


He's gotta be strong, or he's gotta be fast, or he's gotta be larger than life

by persuna



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, M/M, superhero typical levels of suspension of disbelief required, three idiots in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-10-24 09:07:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20703449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persuna/pseuds/persuna
Summary: It was entirely accidental when Lovett disrupted a biological attack on the final two candidates in the 2008 Democratic primary.





	He's gotta be strong, or he's gotta be fast, or he's gotta be larger than life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nobirdstofly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nobirdstofly/gifts).

> A remix of ["Wait, my hero’s secret identity is… you?"](https://no-birdstofly.tumblr.com/post/174661045655/wait-my-heros-secret-identity-is-you-to-be) by nobirdstofly, which in far fewer words manages to get across a lot of this. I hope this does justice to other parts of the story!
> 
> This would be a barely readable mass of errors if not for one brave, insightful and efficient beta, justlikesomuch. Thank you for making this so much better Jess!

_2008, Fort Wayne_

It was entirely accidental when Lovett disrupted a biological attack on the final two candidates in the 2008 Democratic primary. At the time, he was feeling about as far from heroic as you could get. The primary was technically still ongoing, but it looked increasingly unlikely that all the shitty food and sleepless nights were going to be validated by landing the job of his dreams in the White House. Also, it was five am, Lovett had a half hour window for a nap before he was expected somewhere else, someone had pressed the button to reopen the elevator doors milliseconds before they could close and start his ascent to freedom, and that person was his irresponsibly handsome, technically more senior counterpart on the Obama campaign. He had reasons, multiple, to be grumpy.

Like Lovett, Favreau looked unkempt and exhausted. He was presumably completing the same unglamourous pre-morning mission that Lovett was, delivering copies of his candidate's speech to the basement of the hotel in person because apparently the internet wasn't working in Indiana or teleprompters didn't connect to the Internet or some such backwater bullshit, and they needed time to get everything set up for the event they were both attending that evening. 

Unlike Lovett, Favreau’s unshaven, haggard face still glowed from within with optimism and a higher purpose. Lovett looked down at the floor. He didn’t have the resources to deal with that level of nonsense right now. 

His gaze might have remained on the floor for the remainder of their elevator ride, safe and uncontentious, if the tell-tale ding of the doors opening yet again hadn't sounded, cutting their ride off. Lovett looked up, ready to add a new person to his bad books, but it was Favreau who had, again, against all decency and reason, opened the doors. Not only that, he was now holding them open for some delivery guy who wasn’t even hurrying. Who was positively _dawdling_.

"I'll get the next one." The delivery man was a calm pool of sanity in a roiling storm of idiots. "This is pretty big." He was right. Whatever he was wheeling—it was inside a rickety looking crate, so Lovett couldn't actually see it—was very large. Freight elevator large, if you asked Lovett’s opinion. Which no one was. 

"We can scooch," Favreau said. 

They could scooch? What was _wrong_ with these people? Never mind that now the delivery guy, already sweaty on a level that Lovett empathised with deeply, had to hurry to get to them. Never mind that everyone's journeys took longer overall if you continually disrupted the natural justice of the elevator queuing system. No, no, it was all idealism and no pragmatism with their lot, even when it got worse results. Even when Lovett really, really needed to fit that nap in. He escalated to glaring at the shorn back of Favreau’s head. It would take bigger brown eyes and a squarer jaw than even this beautiful dolt had to erase injustice of such a magnitude.

When the delivery guy reached them, it still wasn't over. Whatever was in the crate was so heavy that the wheels of the handcart got stuck going over the ridges of the elevator entrance. This kind of thing was exactly why God invented service entrances.

Favreau, unable to admit that he'd wasted everyone's time, sprang into action. "Let me give you a hand."

The delivery guy didn't seem enthused at the offer, perhaps because he too had tired of all this actually inconvenient politeness, but he didn't have a chance to turn down the help before Favreau was next to him, ready to set his hands to the pump. Ugh. Lovett leaned against the wall and watched them heave the first set of wheels over the bump. Favreau puffed out a surprised breath at the weight, but didn’t balk, heaving again to get the second set of wheels over. The contents of the crate clinked, in retrospect, ominously.

“Third floor,” panted the delivery man, which made sense. That was where the event was happening later. There were probably drinks or glassware or an ice sculpture in there. Wordlessly, Lovett pressed the button for the third floor.

Now that whatever-it-was was in the elevator, there wasn’t even enough room for Favreau and the delivery man to turn around. They had to ride to the first floor facing each other. It was so awkward that it almost cheered Lovett up. He’d always taken a certain perverse satisfaction in seeing other people squirm over trivial things, a small karmic rebalancing for all the normal social situations that Lovett didn’t get quite right.

The doors dinged open onto the first floor. With a look of relief, Favreau stepped out. The lobby was quiet at this time in the morning, but it still contained the only thing Lovett was interested in: the exit. On the other side of that was Lovett’s own, much cheaper hotel. All that stood between him and a twenty five minute nap was a brisk walk. And the mysterious crate.

“Can you let me out?” Lovett asked, when the delivery guy made no move to clear the way.

With a look of defeat, the delivery man tugged at the crate. It barely budged. Favreau, already a few steps towards freedom, paused, shoulders slumped, and came back. Ugh. He was so _nice_. Why couldn’t he be a dick, like that press secretary from the Obama campaign who had sneered at him the other day? At least then hating him would feel more natural.

More to irritate his hope-and-changey counterpart than anything else, Lovett asked, "What is this stuff, anyway?" and—this was rude, he knew, but it was _early_ and this was taking forever and they needed more momentum behind the damn thing anyway—kicked the back of the crate. Lightly. Or at least, it was supposed to be lightly. He was expecting the answer to be booze and maybe an eye roll from Favreau. He wasn't expecting to catch the side of the crate with his foot and knock it off entirely, or for the delivery man to scream, "NO!” like Palpatine had just told him he'd murdered his own wife.

Not that Lovett didn’t feel terrible about his rampant property damage, but it seemed like a slight overreaction. He crouched down to pick up the bit of wood, planning to wedge it back on as best he could and apologise profusely. Regardless of whether the howling was necessary, it was definitely his bad. Then he glanced sideways into the crate, and any thoughts or intentions other than _oh fuck_ were wiped from his mind.

The glass canisters of faintly luminescent green liquid were not what Hollywood had prepped him for, but everything else—the nest of wires in red, green and blue, the digital clock perched on top of it all—was horribly familiar. Lovett knew what this was.

“Bomb.” His throat was so tight he could barely force the word through.

“What?” Favreau frowned down at him.

“It’s a bomb!” Lovett shouted. His heart was pounding so hard he could hear it. “Get out, oh my god, it’s a fucking bomb!” 

Illustrating his villainy handily, the delivery man shoved Favreau forward onto the crate, which splintered even further, and then pulled what was unmistakably a detonator out of his pocket. Someone in the lobby screamed. On the edge of Lovett’s awareness, what hadn’t narrowed down to the bomb he was trapped behind and the man with the button to set it off, he could sense people running.

The delivery man—no, Lovett downgraded him severely—the _terrorist_ flicked his eyes between Lovett, still crouched at the back of the elevator, Favreau, sprawled awkwardly on the remains of the crate, and the lobby, rapidly emptying of what few people it had once held. Maybe he was contemplating the value that their lives might hold in some kind of negotiation. Maybe he was just freaking the fuck out. Whichever one it was, he didn’t seem to like his odds, because he pressed the button on the detonator, flung it across the lobby, and bolted for the exit. The clock beeped, and started counting down.

3:00

2:59

2:58

Seeking human connection, a natural urge in times of crisis such as when you were less than three minutes from being forcibly exploded from this mortal coil, Lovett made eye contact with Favreau. He looked as terrified as Lovett felt, which was reassuring.

2:56

Cringing, Favreau eased himself off the splintered lid of the crate. Half of it slid off and clattered to the floor.

“Gently,” Lovett blurted redundantly. Favreau knew to be careful of giant bombs that looked like something out of Dexter’s Laboratory. Everyone knew that.

Despite the fact that he had been admirably careful, one of the canisters of liquid was cracked. Great. The thing hadn’t even exploded yet, and already its structural integrity was failing. As well as being murderous, the builder of this was clearly a subpar craftsperson.

Behind the glass, the liquid was roiling, like the agitation had activated it. Or more likely, some detached corner of Lovett's brain theorised, it was a gas that had been liquefied under pressure and now that its container had been breached, it was starting to vaporize. Which would mean it was expanding. Which could mean the canister exploding before the timer even reached zero. As if to prove this hypothesis, with a snap like ice fracturing in a warm drink, the crack doubled in length. Instinctively, Favreau took a step back. Lovett, with nowhere to go, could only flinch.

2:49

“Can you get past?” Favreau asked. There was only an inch or two of clearance on each side of the crate, not enough room to get past even if Lovett moved it to one side. It didn’t seem stable enough for him to climb over it. But he couldn’t die trapped behind a bomb with enough time to get out, that was too stupid. Lovett edged himself up against the wall and tried to ease a leg behind it, but his thighs had not magically become paper thin. He shook his head. 

2:35

2:34

Underneath the crate, a heavy mass of grey green, opaque smoke was slowly blooming, like slow motion dry ice in a music video with really tacky lighting. The canister must already be leaking. Where the smoke touched it, the faux parquet flooring blackened and curled. Lovett swallowed and backed his heels into the wall. He didn't want to know what that would do to the human body.

No longer impeded, the elevator doors started to close.

2:28

2:29

The doors dinged in protest, springing open once again as Favreau jammed the call button. He couldn't leave the fucking thing alone.

"Okay. I’ll roll it out, nice and easy." Arms stretched as long as possible, Favreau pulled slowly on the handcart. It rolled maybe a half an inch, glass canisters rattling against each other. The crack splintered into a spider-web of little white lines.

"Don't!" It wasn't that Lovett didn't appreciate Favreau's urge to be a white knight, but it didn't seem to be helping. 

2:08

Lovett tried to think of another thing to try, but his brain was empty of anything except yawning terror. 

2:07

Behind them, the lobby was empty.

"You should go." Lovett's lips felt numb and stupid, like his face was already dying in protest from how fucking terrifying this was. "You have to go."

2:04

"I can't just leave you here." Favreau’s eyes were wide and wet and tragic. Why did his face have to look so goddamn expressive? If he cried, Lovett was going to cry, and then he wouldn’t even die with his dignity intact. 

“It’s okay. I’ll move it out,” if Lovett could even the shift it, the damn thing weighed a fucking ton, “and it will probably be fine,” his voice wavered, unable to maintain the pretence of believing that even for five words, “but just in case it isn’t, you have to leave.” Whatever happened, there was literally no point in both of them being dematerialized or hacking their internal organs out through their mouths or whatever this stuff did.

“It’s too heavy. You push, and I’ll pull and—"

Why wouldn’t Favreau just leave? In normal circumstances, Lovett was preternaturally skilled at driving people away, but it usually took him slightly longer than, fuck, a minute and fifty seconds. Lovett opened his mouth to yell at him to get the fuck out, but in the time it took him to draw the breath to do it, there was suddenly a third person there, next to Favreau. Involuntarily, Lovett redeployed the breath he'd drawn as a little shriek of surprise.

The new arrival was wearing a bodysuit of tight, shiny blue spandex and, judging by the way it clung to him, little to nothing else. The suit covered his entire face—ears, mouth and all—with big oval reflective lenses over the eyes. He looked like a ridiculous, budget Spiderman from a film’s first act, but also filled the horrible suit out well enough that he almost pulled it off. Even in the midst of a near death experience, Lovett wanted him to turn around so he could check out the view from behind. Between the suit and the surprising way he’d appeared, he had to be powered. Lovett hoped to God that it was something relevant. He hadn’t heard of Indiana having a local hero, which didn’t bode well for him having an impressive power, but maybe that was just his coastal elitism speaking. Maybe this guy could teleport. That seemed like it would be useful. 

Their hero’s first move, which did not inspire a great deal of confidence, was to grab Favreau by the shoulders. Lovett tried not to judge. Maybe he'd mistaken him for the bad guy, which was understandable. They were the only ones here, Favreau had a Generic European Henchperson buzzcut thing going on, these things happened. Lovett would explain and they could all refocus their attention on the bomb. It had more than a minute and a half left on the timer. Loads of time.

The theory went off the rails when, instead of attempting whatever kind of citizen’s arrest heroes used, he whispered "Are you okay?" There was an intensity in his voice that did not, okay, maybe it did befit the circumstances, which were extreme, but the intensity was definitely directed in an unhelpful direction. Lovett was the one stuck behind a death machine set to explode.

Looking as bewildered as anyone, Favreau flicked his eyes over to Lovett for a moment of what-the-fuck commiseration. "Um. Yes?”

The hero ran his hands down Favreau's arms like he was checking for injuries. Well that was unprofessional. Lovett was going to die because the local vigilante was a fondler with a taste for handsome douches. 

“Er, but there is..." Favreau gestured to the elevator, the bomb, the ticking clock, Lovett trapped behind it all. You know, the subtext of this rescue.

1:36

1:35

The urgent question of how firm Favreau's arms were out of the way, the hero released one of Favreau's shoulders and turned to assess the actual situation. He kept one hand on Favreau though. The elevator doors tried to close again, and he still kept a hand on him, waving the other one between the doors absentmindedly. They retracted with an angry ding. 

Lovett started to feel pretty seriously put out. He was the one that needed to be manhandled out of here by someone with superhuman abilities. No wonder the guy was stuck in this backwater. He probably got expelled from a more major city for groping the victims of crime.

1:08

1:09

"Stand back," their rescuer commanded. He pushed Favreau gently to the side as he said it, but it did at least seem to be a general piece of advice for both of them.

Lovett looked around pointedly. "How?" He was already plastered as close as he could possibly get to the back wall of the elevator, and oh yeah, _there was a bomb right in front of him_. 

Ignoring Lovett’s question, he gripped the handcart handle. "It's going to be okay." He was still whispering. Lovett hoped his power wasn’t voice-based, like that woman in Atlanta whose scream knocked out everyone in a ten foot radius. As much as Lovett would have preferred to be unconscious right now, that didn’t seem like it would help. 

"Gently!" Lovett warned. The cracked canister probably didn't have another jostle in it, let alone whatever superpowered shit this guy was going to do to it. “It’s almost broken.”

"Don't worry, I'm going to get this out of here. Fast." His muscles, clearly outlined by the thin spandex, bunched like he was about to yank the crate away. 

Admittedly, Lovett wasn’t being clear, but also their would be rescuer wasn't listening. “That’s not what I—"

"One of the—" Favreau started to say.

It was too late. For a split second, Lovett could still see him, tipping over the edge of movement. Then, as suddenly as he'd appeared in the first place, he and the crate vanished. It was so quick that the gunshot crack of the beleaguered canister shattering seemed to sound afterwards, but like thunder following lightning, it must have happened simultaneously. The bomb was gone, but it had left something behind: a sparkling cloud of glass shards raining down and a cloud of smoky green billowing out in an upside down mushroom cloud.

Lovett caught a momentary glimpse of Favreau’s shocked face before, finally unobstructed, the elevator doors snapped closed.

There was nowhere to go. Vivid smog washed up Lovett's body, damp and steam-hot, and then expanded out, pressing into every corner of the small space like it was searching for a way out, bearing down on Lovett until he felt like he was going to be liquefied himself under the pressure. He gasped and it filled his mouth, thick and hot and strangely solid, like a towel soaked in boiling water being crammed into his throat. It surged down into his lungs, blistering him inside and out, more painful than anything he'd ever felt in his whole life.

Lovett assumed, as much as he was able to form any thoughts, that this was going to finish him off. He'd always wondered if he'd use his last moments to take stock of his life so far, but it hurt too fucking much. He just wanted it to be over.

Then suddenly, it was. The pain vanished like a switch had been flipped. Whatever the fuck this stuff was, it must have burned his nerves off first. Small mercies. Vaguely, through the ringing relief of the pain ending, Lovett felt himself collapsing to the floor. So he still had a body then, hadn't dissolved entirely into goo like he'd half expected. That was good. His mom would probably get more closure if they had something to bury. He blinked up into the fog, awaiting the final darkness of oblivion or a bright light or whatever the fuck came next. At least that mystery would get cleared up.

Neither came. The fog lightened from seafoam to more of a pale mint. It seemed to be dissipating. He could almost make out the shiny wood panels of the elevator above.

By the time the doors opened onto the third floor, there was nothing left to escape but a few wisps of pastel mist. Lovett's body felt so heavy he couldn't move, but it was distinctly still there. His head was swimming, his stomach churning, every muscle ached. In other words, his organs hated him, so they must still be doing something.

A stupid blue balaclava with shiny bug eyes appeared in his field of vision. Great. This fucking guy. 

_Fuck off_, Lovett tried to say. It came out more like blowing a raspberry, "Fthfth," but the spirit was the same.

The mask shifted like the person under it might be grimacing apologetically. Or maybe he was flexing his jaw in manly anger. Lovett hadn’t really got a handle on him yet. "Are you okay?" he asked.

Of all the. Lovett took a moment to settle his tongue before replying this time. If he could still talk, he wanted to address the gall of that question properly. "Now you ask." His voice was raspy, but still understandable. "I don't know. Is my skin still attached?"

"It is." He put a hand on either side of Lovett's face and leaned in close to peer into Lovett's eyes, shiny bug lenses as intent as shiny bug lenses could be, and said, "No hemorrhaging. That’s good.” 

Was it? Lovett couldn’t be that comforted by a sentence with the word hemorrhage in it. 

The alleged hero slid an arm under Lovett's shoulders and levered him to his feet. Lovett let the other man do all of the work. He hadn't even wanted to stand up. He'd been perfectly happy on the floor.

"Where are you staying?"

"Days Inn,” Lovett panted. As he’d expected, standing was hard. “Down the road. But..." Not to make a fuss, but Lovett had recently been the victim of a bizzarre biological attack and the aftermath felt like the worst hangover and the worst flu he'd ever had had a baby and that baby had come to take revenge for the aspirin and antibiotics he'd used to murder its parents. It seemed like a situation where he needed more than some semi-competent amateur who wore sunglasses indoors to check how red his eyes were. "Hospital?"

"It's best not to. You'll either be fine or. Well. There'll be nothing they can do."

Nothing they could do? What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Lovett decided to give the walking thing a proper go. He'd take himself to the hospital, or at least to a more trustworthy fellow adult who'd call him an ambulance like he clearly deserved. Unfortunately, walking was even harder than standing. His knees buckled and it was only the strong arm wrapped around his shoulders that kept him upright. 

“Oh no you don’t,” his rescuer/kidnapper said. A second strong arm looped under his knees, and then he was in a full on bridal carry, six foot something up in the air with one hand cupped around a very firm pec like he was Lois Lane. Even though he'd decided this guy was a dick, something in Lovett went a little fluttery. In his defence, he’d been through a lot. And dick or not, his shoulder was kind of perfect. Very warm. Very comfortable. Lovett could definitely pass out here.

"Close your eyes," rumbled his pillow, which happened to be exactly what Lovett wanted to do.

No sooner had he closed them than his pillow tensed and without warning, Lovett was in the middle of a tornado. A tornado that held him close with strong arms, but also shook him around like it was mixing a protein drink. He tried to open his eyes, but they were held down by gale force winds. This was what Lovett got for following straightforward instructions promptly.

After far too many seconds, the tornado relented. Lovett opened his eyes to a vaguely familiar hotel corridor. "What the fuck," he moaned. Seriously, what the fuck?

"I had to run us pretty fast through the lobby to avoid being seen. It's teeming with Secret Service." That had been _running_? "And to swipe a key card for this place.” Awkwardly, given that Lovett was still clinging to his shoulder, he touched a card to the hotel room door, opened it, and stepped through. “That took a few turns round the desk." 

Lovett scrabbled at the now much less inviting arms, and they lowered him back to standing. His stomach turned over, clearly not enjoying his morning of black coffee, near death and Tasmanian devil style travel.

"Uh oh." At least the blue bastard had enough empathy to realize what was about to happen. He half-carried Lovett to the en suite, just in time for him to vomit copiously into the toilet. This day got better and better. "All done?"

Too miserable to speak, let alone lift his head off the toilet seat, Lovett nodded. Perhaps sensing that he had lost all will to stand, sit, or advocate for himself, his rescuer carried him to the bed.

"What're you doing?" Lovett asked, when he tugged Lovett's shoes off and started patting him down.

"You need to sleep it off for a few hours, and I’m afraid I have to go." Over his feeble protests, he pulled Lovett’s phone from his pocket and set it down on the desk in the corner. After a moment’s hesitation, he got a blanket out of the wardrobe and shook it out over the bed. Lovett let it happen. Odds were he’d die in his sleep, but it didn't seem like he could do much to fight it.

"Hey." Someone, he was pretty sure he knew who, tapped his face. "_Hey_. Are you listening?"

"No," Lovett groaned.

"You can go to the hospital later if you still want to. But you might find..." 

"What, I won't be able to go if I'm dead? No shit."

The edges of Lovett’s vision were darkening, but he could still see a tall blue figure walking to the other side of the room. He came back a minute later with a bit of paper, which he held in front of Lovett’s face. He squinted at it and could just about make out 'Bolt' and a string of numbers. 

"If something. Um. Weird happens when you wake up, you can call me." Bolt placed the piece of paper delicately on the bedside table. 

‘Weird?’ Lovett would have asked if he still had the strength to open his mouth. 

Bolt paused in the doorway and turned back to say, "You'll know what I mean if it happens."

This time, when the world began to dissolve into grey, Lovett let unconsciousness come, a welcome escape.

The reprieve didn’t last. Some indeterminate time later, Lovett was roused by a burst of heat that seemed to come from deep within him, pulling every muscle in his body taught. He gasped awake, sure that he'd see the bed aflame or his flesh sloughing off his bones, something dramatic enough to explain why he was burning from the inside out. The sun was brighter than it had been and his vision was blurry with ugh, sweat or melting eyeballs he wasn’t sure, but otherwise his surroundings looked as drab and banal and uncharred by flame as they ever had. It didn’t make sense. Was this a fever? As the sensation died away, it was almost like the faint memories of flu and chickenpox Lovett had from his childhood, where the whole world went sweaty and loud and confusing.

Another nauseating wave of fire washed through his body, hotter and sharper than any half-remembered illness. Once he had regained control of his arms, Lovett tugged the blanket mostly off his body, again sure that there had to be some external sign that something terrible was happening to him. Again, nothing. His body was weak and damp with sweat, but there was nothing that could explain the strange, unnatural pulse of heat still rolling over him, out of him. He needed help. 

His phone, Lovett dimly recalled, was on the other side of the room, a few short but arduous feet away. If he could get to it he could call someone, anyone. An ambulance, the Fire Department, room service. Even Bolt at this point would be reassuring. Surely if he’d known this would happen, he wouldn’t have just left Lovett like this? Trying to do anything more strenuous than light writhing and thrashing however, proved to be easier planned than done. Lovett managed to flop onto his belly and drag himself to the edge of the bed, where he took a breather, trying not to hurl onto the hideous purple-brown carpet that rotated beneath the bed. 

Getting the first leg down on the floor was not that hard, gravity was on his side. Even the second, once he’d twisted to the right angle, wanted to go in that direction. The difficulty came when Lovett tried to put his weight on his legs. Gravity turned on him, his legs buckled, and he was once again completely prone when the third wave of blistering heat rolled over him. But on the floor this time. He shuddered and gasped and pressed his face into the carpet, every muscle cramping. 

Try as Lovett might, he could not muster the strength to move more than a few inches. He could do nothing more than lie there until, eventually, he passed out. 

The next time Lovett was aware of anything, it was the sound of a door opening. His first thought was that Bolt was back with another cryptic, unhelpful fucking comment, which honestly, he could do without. Continued unconsciousness sounded more inviting. Then he heard the squeak of small rubber wheels and that popped his eyes right open. Heart pounding, Lovett turned to see what fresh hell was being wheeled in. Thankfully, it was only a maid with some cleaning supplies, which Lovett was not going to allow to unsettle him any more than it already had. The last thing he needed was an irrational phobia of things on wheels.

The maid gave a little start when she saw him lying on the floor next to the bed. Lovett blinked at her dumbly, still trying to shake off the weight of deep sleep. 

"Sorry," she said, barely phased, and backed out of the room, pulling the door shut.

Trying to move as little as possible, Lovett took inventory of his surroundings. The room was familiar, in general from dozens of bland hotel chains across the country, and more specifically from yesterday when he'd checked in. The layout looked identical. All the room lacked was the, uh, character that a generous scattering of Lovett’s stuff had added to his. 

The light outside was dim in a distinctly dusk rather than dawn way. It felt like a lifetime had passed since he'd been tucked into bed by a man in a gimp mask, but according to the clock on the bedside table, it was only seven pm. He'd been asleep for at least twelve hours. 

Shit. He’d missed three meetings and two deadlines. 

If he had been asleep that long, it might explain why, contrary to his expectations, he didn’t feel terrible. Audaciously, he even started to hope that he might have made it through this nightmarish experience intact. Adrenaline would have worn off by now, and the maid probably would have reacted differently if his face had been melted off or turned green. Granted, so far the most strenuous thing he'd done was lie motionless on the floor and blink, but initial signs were positive. 

Braced for at the very least an almighty crick in his neck, Lovett sat up. Nothing fell off his body and nothing hurt. If anything, he felt… good. Like he’d slept too long, but had really needed it. Not at all like he’d spent several hours lying insensible on a polyester carpet. He stood up and wow, yeah. His legs felt elastic and full of energy, as if they wanted to go on a five mile run right now. Was this normal? People said that near-death experiences were life affirming, but he hadn’t thought it would be so physical. 

It all seemed too good to be true, so Lovett approached the bathroom mirror with some trepidation. He didn’t look as good as he felt. One side of his face was imprinted with the pattern of cheap carpet, his hair was a lopsided disaster, and his shirt looked like he’d been out clubbing all night. If he’d ever had a tie, it was long gone. In other words, he was almost campaign-trail normal. He splashed some water on his face—it seemed like the thing to do, but it didn’t do much—and did his best to finger comb his hair into a more symmetrical mess. 

Well, there was no point looking a gift horse in the mouth. Especially when, unless a real alternate universe level miracle had happened, it still came with a shit-ton of questions about, at best, where his rewrite of the comments for this afternoon had been, and at worst, what the fuck had happened. First he located his phone, not checking the screen to see how many missed calls he had. He’d work up to that. Next, his shoes. As Lovett wedged his feet back into them, he tried to think about how he could explain this. He hadn’t actually done anything wrong, so maybe… honesty?

The piece of paper with Bolt’s number was still on the bedside table, oddly tawdry looking in the light of day. Maybe not complete honesty. The subtle humiliation of being sort of rescued, sort of left for dead by a “hero” who didn’t seem to give a damn wasn’t really something Lovett wanted to explain. More so he didn’t have to look at it or risk explaining it to anyone, he folded the paper up small and shoved it deep into his pocket.

It was time to face the music. Lovett walked to the hotel room door, took a deep breath, and opened it. As the door swung open, he realised that the handle was still in his hand, snapped clean off. That was. Maybe not weird, exactly. Things broke all the time. He dropped it back inside the room. If he somehow ended up getting charged for that, there was no justice in the world. All he’d done was use it in a perfectly normal manner. He gave the door a gentle tug to close it and conceal the evidence. It slammed shut with the power of a hundred pissed off teenagers storming to their rooms. 

Oh no. Oh fuck. Lovett had seen enough repetitious superhero origin movies to have a sinking sensation about what was going on. With a silent apology to Days Inn, he put a hand on the door jamb and squeezed. The wood collapsed under his hand as easily as the cube of foam at the centre of a flower arrangement. He let go and left behind a hand sized dent. Shit. And he had a fucking splinter. 

Sucking on his finger, Lovett walked away as fast as he could without seeming suspicious. As he’d thought, he was in his hotel, but two floors down. He turned into the stairwell, moving on autopilot. What were you supposed to do when you developed superpowers? Should he flee? He didn’t want to flee. He didn’t want any of this. Lovett took the stairs at a run, but he was barely out of breath when he got to his floor, and he was pretty sure that was more panic than exertion. His legs were as fresh as if he’d strolled half a block downhill. This got worse and worse. 

The question of whether or not he was going to flee answered itself when he got back to his room and found a Secret Service agent and Jay, the Clinton campaign’s press secretary, inside. 

“Lovett!” Their interactions so far had been purely professional, but Jay seemed genuinely relieved to see Lovett. Going missing from the scene of an attempted terrorist attack would make people worry, so that checked out. He even gave Lovett a brief, entirely unnecessary hug that Lovett didn’t feign returning, an image of the door jamb stark in his mind. Accidentally crushing a more senior member of the campaign team to death would probably be worse than seeming a little rude. “Are you okay? What happened? Where have you been?” 

“I.” No story prepared, Lovett ended up going with the truth. Kind of. “I was asleep.”

“You were asleep.” The Secret Service agent repeated this claim with the scepticism that it deserved.

“I must have been in shock. You know, the bomb nearly went off—"

“The Obama guy said a bit of it did go off.”

“-only part of it. I mean, it was terrifying,” Lovett shook off a vision of burning green smoke engulfing him, but something must have showed on his face, because the Secret Service agent looked less incredulous and more sympathetic, “but I thought I was okay. And I came back here, but I must have been more out of it than I thought, because I went to the wrong room and I just. Fell asleep.”

After a few moments in which Lovett felt sure that someone would mention how preposterous his story was, Jay smiled and said, “You really can nap anywhere.”

From there on out, it was all a blur. Lovett went to the hospital, because that was what you did after you’d nearly died, and played very dumb over his entirely clean bill of health. He talked to a dizzying variety of special agents of various flavours, and played it even dumber over what the hell happened. When you’d sort of foiled an assasination attempt and then vanished suspiciously for the best part of a day, people had a lot of questions. Lovett couldn't answer any of them. He tried to keep his arms and hands loose and relaxed at all times, terrified of even picking up anything when people were looking, but if anything, it contributed positively to his largely authentic dazed and confused routine. In a remarkably short period of time, everyone seemed to have accepted that he knew nothing about anything. Hillary even dropped by his hospital room to tell him very kindly and sincerely that she was glad he was okay and to thank him for his part in preempting the attack. 

For a little while, the attempted bombing was all the news talked about and Obama and Clinton were united in a show of Democratic unity against the forces of darkness. Then Hillary won Indiana by a whisker, and the gloves were off again. In a remarkably short period of time, the whole incident had blown over into a footnote in primary history. 

The most lingering effect was the full two weeks that Lovett was given to rest and recover. He flew back to his parents' house and determinedly didn’t explore the limits of, he hated even thinking this word, his _powers_. He didn’t want them, he didn’t need them, and as far as Lovett could tell, pretending they weren’t there was working out pretty well so far. Instead, Lovett cobbled his own practice routine for all the normal things that normal people did with their limbs—opening doors without incident, putting on pants without busting any seams open, picking up a Diet Coke without it exploding in his hand—a kind of reverse physical therapy where he had to learn to do everything with a fraction of the strength he’d once used. 

His mom got so sick of him opening and closing the kitchen cabinets that she banned him from the whole room. “If you’re hungry you can _ask_ me, you’re supposed to be _resting_” she said, as she shooed him back to the couch.

He didn’t call Bolt. Something weird may have happened, but nothing else weird was going to happen, because he had a greater power than even a mad scientist could bestow at his disposal: denial. And if something weird did happen, Bolt was the last person he’d want to call. He’d presumably be about as careful at mentoring as he was at rescues, and Lovett wasn’t in the mood to be bullied by some lycra-clad super jock, even one that technically did get the bulk of the job done. 

Lovett did do some googling, he was a millennial, after all. Bolt was a relatively new hero with, until now, a pretty low profile. Perhaps because of the nature of his power, super-speed, he had a larger geographic range than usual. Most of his activity was in Iowa, but he had popped up elsewhere in the Midwest before. It probably wasn’t that big a deal to travel a couple of states over if you could run faster than the human eye could see. 

There had been a surge of interest in Bolt since the incident in Indiana, a few articles in the national press pulled together from tweets and other social media mentions from people he’d helped, but Bolt didn’t seem to have done anything to leverage his higher profile. As far as Lovett could tell, he’d gone right back to the same sporadic low-level vigilantism that he’d been engaged in previously. 

The point was, Lovett wasn’t calling Bolt. He didn’t need to. He wasn’t even important enough to be in the top five things that Lovett was actively ignoring. He was somewhere below an e-mail Lovett had received from Favreau, asking how he was doing and if he wanted to get a drink next time they were in the same city. Not that he was going to respond to that either. All Lovett wanted to do was put this whole thing behind him, help Hillary Clinton win, never have to see Jon Favreau’s annoyingly handsome face again, and get a job writing for the President of the United States. Achievable, concrete goals.

* * *

_2009, Washington DC_

Wrong-turns and fuckups beset Lovett en route to his dream job, but somehow, he got there anyway. Talk about the story of his life.

In order to manage this, several subsidiary goals had fallen by the wayside. Swearing off Favreau’s face, for example. Right now, it was creased into exactly the kind, understanding shape that he hadn’t wanted to see it in. “Do you want to take the stairs?” he asked. 

“No. I'm fine.” Lovett took a deep breath and stepped into the elevator. It wasn’t like he’d exclusively used stairs for the last year, but getting in a small metal box with present company was giving him an unsettling sense of deja vu. As long as no delivery men tried to join them, he could rise above it. “This is all just a bit surreal.” 

And it was. Him and Jon at-least-call-me-Favs Favreau in an elevator again, colleagues instead of enemies. And the elevator was in the White House. And Lovett had superpowers, not that that was something he thought about if he could help it. Truly, life was a rich tapestry.

They had not yet explicitly referenced the glowing green elephant in the room, not through Lovett’s interview, or subsequent phone call about getting the job, or the coffee where Jon had explained that this was a normal time for paperwork to take and they hadn’t rescinded the job offer without notifying him. Lovett gave it a go. 

“People probably don’t usually say this their first day in the White House, but I am banking for slightly less excitement than the last time we were in an elevator together.”

Jon laughed harder than the joke deserved, head tipped back, an instant dopamine rush of a response. Lovett watched the motion, fascinated. Fantastic. Less than an hour into his new job he already had an inappropriate appreciation for his straight boss’s tanned throat. 

“I can only promise less immediate peril,” was all that Jon would concede. 

As Lovett would come to discover, Jon’s promises were always sincere. Writing for the President could be perilous for democracy if you didn’t do it right, but nothing in the office exploded, and when the speech itself was boring, the high stakes kept you focused. 

In some ways, the White House exceeded Lovett’s brightest hopes. He had expected to feel isolated in the Obama administration, at least for the first few months, an acquired taste surrounded by cliquey Obama bros. But when you were on the inside, it turned out Obama bros were great company. 

After only a few weeks Lovett had been forced to concede that, contrary to his suspicions, Jon was genuinely, to use a deeply inadequate word, _nice_. Not in the euphemism for boring way that people, including Lovett, often meant, but for real. All-nighters and Lovett’s lackadaisical approach to deadlines, working hours and formal dress sometimes tested him, but in general, Jon was so open and kind that it forced everyone around him, even Lovett, to try and meet him on his level. 

The pale, angry press secretary that Lovett had glared at across multiple rooms was called Tommy, and he was so great Lovett moved in with him. Beneath the college legacy confidence and the bone structure honed by years of selective socialite breeding beat a deceptively high-strung heart, but once Tommy cracked open, he was so worth it. The best antagonist and co-conspirator and late night Game of Thrones watching companion Lovett had ever had, challenging and surprising and nerdy and trying—to a depth that Lovett would not have guessed at from the outside—so very endearingly hard. 

It was a bit of a nightmare being relentlessly platonic soulmates with two handsome straight boys, but the benefits outweighed the guilty daydreams and the intermittent, disappointing dates with inferior men. 

Another positive was that going straight from the elevator incident to the seat of the government’s power made it easy for Lovett to ignore his super-strength. He was busy, his job was the definition of sedentary, and literally no one ever seriously asked for his help with anything physical. If he wasn’t so busy enjoying the fruits of their assumptions, he might have been offended. The only thing stopping Lovett from forgetting entirely about the fact that he might be able to lift a car if he wanted to, was that Jon had a definite thing for heroes. 

Lovett didn’t know if it stemmed from or predated their encounter with Bolt in Indiana, and he was too busy avoiding engaging with Jon on the issue to ask, but if there was a story about a hero in the press, Jon was talking about it. If there was a movie about a hero, he was dragging people to see it and dissecting all the factual inaccuracies afterwards because he fancied himself some kind of amateur expert. If there was a documentary about the hero phenomena in US culture, he was going to watch it, even if Tommy and Lovett had been invited over under very different terms. 

“Oh come on,” Tommy groaned, when he and Lovett arrived at Jon’s apartment to find the History Channel already on. “Isn’t there a game on somewhere?”

On screen, black and white footage of a man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and muscles that Arnold Schwarzenegger would have envied played. He lifted two motorcycles, a perfectly coiffed pinup girl astride each one, to riotous applause from a watching audience. 

“If I’d known there was a game on, I wouldn't have come,” Lovett said, mainly playing to expectations. He would rather have watched a game. At least with sports he could complain and ogle freely.

“I’ve never seen this one!” Jon protested, “And it’s supposed to be good.”

In a theatre in the 1930s, members of the audience were invited to come and sweep the motorcycles for hidden wires, and then to attempt to pull the hero’s arms down themselves, until he had three full grown men hanging from each bicep and a plastic smile fixed on his face. Jon shook his head with wonder. Lovett flopped resignedly down on one of Jon’s two couches. At least Jon’s riches meant he could commandeer a full one for himself. There was a reason that the one of them that had “Director” in his job title hosted movie nights. Or renegade documentary nights, whatever. 

The documentary had, in Lovett’s opinion, a pretty mundane structure. It retrod the standard narrative from the purported golden age of government endorsed heroes in the late 40s, through the counter cultural revolution of the 60s and the masked, rebellious heroes that rose to prominence, to the present day, where local heroes with their own Facebook page had become almost ubiquitous, mostly ignored by the government as long as they kept it small scale. There was a slightly interesting addendum about a small but significant bump in the number of powered people in recent years, but even the documentary admitted that that might be down to improved cataloguing and the efficiency of social media at disseminating viral rescue videos. 

Watching Jon’s rapt expression, Lovett couldn’t help but wonder: would he find Lovett that fascinating, if he knew that Lovett could probably lift a car? Would he want to wrap his arms around Lovett’s deceptively skinny bicep and test how strong it was? The documentary, now in its mawkish phase, cut to a girl talking tearfully about how her and a school bus of her classmates would have plunged into a river if not for a mysterious woman in a cape who managed to magnetise the whole bus to a bridge, accompanied by shaky cell phone footage of the woman slumping to the ground in exhaustion afterwards, and Jon’s eyes went positively misty. Lovett wondered if he’d be disappointed to know that Lovett could have lifted cars off people, but never did. 

When Jon unwisely left the remote unattended to go to the bathroom, Lovett changed the channel. 

Tommy looked up from his Blackberry, which he had been frowning at since they got in. The boy worked too hard. "You aren't watching that?"

"No," Lovett replied, too forcefully to avoid further explanation. "My one interaction with a hero was not great."

"In Indiana?" Tommy asked, looking a little pained, as he tended to do when the topic of the averted primary attack came up. Lovett would not have wanted to be in the press team that week either. And the near death, that probably also upset him.

"Yeah. I'm grateful I only got lightly exploded, but whathisname, Bolt”—Lovett affected uncertainty about Bolt’s name masterfully, if he did say so himself—“was kind of a dick about the whole thing."

"I’m sorry." Tommy sounded grave enough that Lovett immediately worried he’d laid it on too thick. 

"It's not your fault. He was probably an Obama person," Lovett joked, trying to project a lack of trauma. 

"What?" Tommy said, startled. Even now, he still took slights against the campaign personally.

"Or maybe he was homophobic,” Lovett continued airily. Tommy rolled his eyes, which was more what Lovett looking for. “The point is, he barely wanted to rescue me."

"Maybe he just sucked at rescuing people," Tommy suggested.

"That goes without saying."

Through some mutual, unspoken agreement, they both fell silent when Jon came back from the bathroom. But when Jon reached for the remote, Tommy swiped it before he could flick back to the History channel. 

"We're watching this."

"We are?" On screen, Ru Paul was dressing down a lacklustre drag performance.

"Yes," Tommy said, in that sexy, firm voice of his, the one Lovett purposely annoyed him to elicit.

Jon shrugged and settled down.

So yes, there were a lot of good things about being a presidential speechwriter. But as proud as Lovett was of some of his work at the White House, a certain dissatisfaction did begin to build. His words were important and useful, sure, but they weren’t his. They weren’t even always in service of the agenda he would have wanted to pursue. They weren’t what Lovett wanted to write, and maybe not even what he was best at. Though that feeling could have been a natural side effect of working alongside Jon, designated by Obama himself as a presidential mind reader.

It was, if Lovett was frank, uncanny. He and Jon could work together for days on a speech, both of them on seemingly the same uncertain journey, eking out short bursts of inspiration into slower all night slogs, trying to synthesize the arguments they’d discussed into a narrative in the president’s voice and struggling the normal amount with that difficult task. But then sometimes Jon would stare into the distance, eyes unfocused, oblivious to all Lovett's fidgeting, and come back with the perfect phrase, so perfect it could have been lifted directly from Obama's brain, and then another, and another, a clear vision for their whole narrative spilling from him like nothing Lovett had ever seen before. It was enough to make anyone else doubt if they had what it took. 

In short, working at the White House was the best job Lovett had ever had, and he also wasn't sure how long he'd be able to stand doing it. The work was vital and varied, and he was surrounded by the best people, passionate, intelligent people trying their darndest to make the system work. It was also exhausting and inhibiting and he was surrounded by the worst people, denizens of DC out to cultivate as much power for themselves as they could. More and more, as months and years went by, Lovett felt like Presidential Speechwriter was no longer his dream job.

* * *

_2015, Los Angeles_

The first time that Lovett used his strength to help someone (someone who was in danger, not just Jon when he couldn't crack open a particularly stubborn jar of salsa) was entirely unplanned. He wasn't looking for trouble. Lovett’s reasons for being out at three am might have felt nefarious, but any harm involved in driving forty minutes for a slice of sheet cake was strictly self-inflicted. 

Down the street from LA's premier late night bakery, things were less clear cut. Two men had a third guy cornered. They were partially concealed by some scaffolding, but it did not look like the third guy wanted to be there. Lovett's first instinct was to call the police. He had invested so heavily in being normal that most of the time he forgot he had any other options. And sure, he was stronger than the average person, but he'd never so much as punched anyone. He didn't want to walk away, but calling the police could be an unnecessary escalation. What if this only looked like a mugging? 

It seemed like a bad idea on multiple levels to try and intervene himself. What would he even _say?_

"Give us the watch," one of the men growled. His voice was low, and they were far away enough that Lovett shouldn’t have been able to make out what they were saying, but he could, faint yet distinct. Lovett had his phone out, was on the verge of dialling 911, when one of the men pulled a knife out of his jacket.

Fucking hell. Without really thinking it through, Lovett threw his plastic box of cake at the man's back. Its speed and trajectory were impressive for a such a flimsy, non-aerodynamic projectile, if Lovett did say so himself. The box hit its target straight on and exploded in a shower of moist crumbs and fluffy, delicious frosting. All three men, but particularly the one with the knife, turned to look at Lovett.

"I didn't interrupt something, did I?" Lovett asked. It wasn't the wittiest, most original repartee, he would be the first to admit that. Trouble coming up with witty repartee was a theme in his life at the moment. But the would-be muggers didn't even try and engage. They were more interested in charging at Lovett, with murder (or at least stabbing) in their eyes.

Instinctively, Lovett turned to run. Then he remembered that he'd started this, and that running away would kind of undermine the gesture. He ended up doing an awkward, 360 degree spin in place. It definitely looked stupid, but it also seemed to confuse the guy with the knife. Before he could comment, or even more importantly stab anyone, Lovett shoved him. Not as hard as he could. Years of conditioning himself not to use his full strength for literally anything were hard to override, and Lovett couldn't quite stop himself from pulling back as his hands made contact with the mugger's shoulders. He hoped it was enough to at least knock him over. 

The mugger flew backwards in a shallow-but-graceful parabola and landed several feet away on a parked car, which protested vociferously. Under the sound of the car alarm, Lovett could hear him give a shocked wheeze.

His partner stopped short, out of reach of Lovett's modest wingspan, with a look of shock on his face. Lovett could relate. For a few moments, Lovett and the second mugger stood facing each other. Then Lovett took a step towards him, and he turned tail and ran, slowing only enough to pull his partner off the car and hurry him, limping but mobile, down the street.

The guy that they'd been assaulting was still on the other side of the road, staring wide-eyed at what had happened. He didn't seem to be injured. He had some cake in his hair and his denim jacket was ripped, but if Lovett was any judge of fashion, he'd bought it that way.

"Are you okay?" Lovett called, not going any closer. He didn't have a clear view of Lovett from where he stood, and if possible, Lovett wanted to keep it that way. "Did they hurt you? Can you get home?"

"I'm fine," the man replied. He looked dazed, eyes flicking between Lovett and the dented car, alarm still blaring. "Thank you. They wanted my wallet, but I only use Apple Pay. Thank you."

"Don't mention it." Lovett bounced on his toes. His whole body felt light and electric. His heart was beating loudly in his chest, but it felt good. Like he'd chased Pundit around the garden on a sunny day or gone on a rollercoaster or told a joke that unexpectedly made fifty people laugh. Like he was anticipating something good happening. Something good _had_ happened. He'd helped someone. "No problem at all."

"How did you _do_ that?"

Lovett laughed, not because anything was funny. Just because things were glorious. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah, but are you—" he started to cross the street towards Lovett.

"Go home!" Lovett had to go. His whole body was buzzing. He started jogging, just to get some space between them, but soon he was running, flat out.

Lovett hadn't gone running in months. He should, in a fair world, have been out of practice, but it was easy. Like flying. He couldn't believe how quickly his night had turned around. Somehow, instead of another long dark night of video games and insomnia, he felt more alive than he'd felt in, God, months. Longer. More than he cared to add up.

Things had been hard lately. 1600 Penn being cancelled had been devastating, but Lovett had known he had other chances. Unjust as it was, he had a foothold in the industry now, and once you were in, you had more opportunities. He knew people and people knew him. If he had ideas, then he could probably find some table of executives to listen to them. 

He hadn't been expecting not to have any ideas. Hadn't known how to cope with months and months of... nothing. Months of avoiding his office because he couldn’t bear to open yet another empty Word document. Of closing his eyes and seeing a phantom blinking cursor on a phantom blank page anyway. Of changing his late night Starbucks three times because the night staff got to know his face and tried to make conversation. Of driving across the city for what was clearly intended to be cake for at least three people, but fuck it, because half a pound of frosting was a drop in the ocean when you were making this many poor choices. Months of feeling useless and increasingly desperate, lying to his friends and family, helplessly watching himself slowly washing-up from his latest unearned career. Not because of someone else’s unfair decision, or the will of the American people, or lack of opportunities, but because of his his own laziness and paralysis. Being _bored_, so very fucking bored, of his life and himself and this town.

What did he have to show, for all the chances he'd had? He'd done important work, and he'd abandoned it for something more creative. He'd had creative work, and he'd fucked it all up. But not tonight. Tonight he'd saved someone. A few seconds of effort, and he'd stopped something horrible happening to someone. It had been easy. It had been _fun_. He felt fantastic.

It was only when he got back to his house and its empty driveway that Lovett realized he'd left his car behind. He must have run almost ten miles.

With dawn lighting the sky, Lovett crawled into bed and fell immediately, blissfully asleep.

Now that he had a valid reason to be awake and roaming the streets at three am, Lovett couldn't stay away. He still wasn't writing, but he was helping people, so it definitely counted as an increase in productivity. At first a few times a week, but increasingly almost every night, he put on his drabbest sweatpants and hoodie, tied a bandana around his face like an outlaw, and drove to the dodgiest parts of LA that he could find, looking for trouble.

Results were mixed. There may have been plenty of trouble to find, but Lovett couldn't always be lucky enough to stumble across it by accident. And on the occasions he did find it, it usually wasn't as easy to deal with as his first foray into vigilantism. He foiled a few more muggings and a car theft or two. He thwarted a robbery at a convenience store, and tossed a flasher into a particularly stinky dumpster. 

He also picked up an assortment of bruises, a sprained wrist, and a nasty cut to the abdomen. Lovett was strong and it appeared, given that the sprained wrist had come from a baseball bat to the arm that he was sure should have broken something, more robust than the average squishy human, but he definitely wasn't invulnerable.

Yet another issue with his current approach came to light one night when he was walking, trying to look like easy pickings, near where he'd first used his powers. There was a stretch of alley where a streetlight had been out for days, and it certainly looked like a prime spot for crime.

Sure enough, when he turned into the alley, he saw what looked like a scuffle.

"Hey!" Lovett shouted. The figure doing the intimidating turned around and sized Lovett up. This was usually when people decided he wasn't a threat and Lovett got to show them how wrong they were.

Instead, the guy said, "Oh shit," and started running. It took Lovett a moment to recognise him as the mugger he'd thrown into a car.

"He's got my wallet!" the other guy said.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise that someone he'd encountered before was back on the street, shaking people down for their valuables. Lovett had stopped him from committing one crime, but then he'd tossed him right back into the water to crime again. Lovett had a split second to decide if he was going to do what he normally did and let the bad guy running away be the end of it, or try a bit harder. He gave chase.

All this time, he had been neglecting the vital final step of fighting crime, which was actually catching the criminals. He was helping individual people out of particular incidents of peril, but he could be helping all the future victims of crimes that hadn't yet been committed. How exactly Lovett would do that, he wasn't sure. The superhero template of films and comic books didn't give him much to go on. There was the “lingering intimidation through violence” technique, which Lovett immediately ruled out. There was the “leaving criminals tied up outside a police station with a note then cut to the next scene” approach, but a wealth of background about if that was a) useful and b) legal was glossed over in the scene change. That left... giving them a talking to?

Already, Lovett was regretting the spontaneous decision to run after the mugger. But he was also gaining on him, so what was he supposed to do? Stop mid chase and go home? Lovett rounded a corner just in time to see the mugger disappearing into what appeared to be a creepy abandoned warehouse. Fan-fucking-tastic. 

Inside, the building was exactly as eerie and cliche as Lovett had expected, dusty and unlit except for what street lighting filtered in through the filthy windows. He could hear the mugger crashing up the stairs. If this was going to turn into some kind of rooftop foot chase, Lovett was out. He'd never even attempted to see how far he could jump.

On the fourth floor, the sound of clunking footsteps and increasingly laboured breathing ahead of Lovett died away. Lovett stopped and peered into the murky depths of the building. The small amount of light struggling in through the window behind him was not enough to illuminate anything. He closed his eyes and tried to listen for signs of where the mugger had gone. By this point, Lovett had revised the ambition of diverting a lost soul from a life of crime down to retrieving this one person's wallet and playing it by ear on the improvised inspirational speech thing, but even to pull that less impressive feat off, he still needed to find the mugger. Half distracted trying to formulate how that conversation would go, he didn't notice the mugger charging at him until it was too late and, in an eerie recreation of the time Lovett had thrown him into a car, the mugger’s hands were connecting hard with Lovett’s shoulders. It wouldn’t have been enough to throw Lovett several feet through the air, but it was enough to send him crashing through the window behind him. From there, gravity did the rest of the work.

It was too surprising for Lovett to fully understand that he might be plummeting to his death. One second he was inside, bracing for his shoulders to connect with the wall behind him, and the next there was no wall and he was outside, the whole world a surreal whirl and his heart strangely weightless feeling in his chest. It was more like a dream about falling than anything else. He landed with a comically loud crash in a pile of trash outside.

The first few moments in the pile of trash, his whole body numb with the impact, were when Lovett thought he might be about to die. He blacked out, not sure of the answer.

Some period of time later, Lovett came to. His whole body hurt to varying degrees and in a myriad of different ways, but he was able to roll himself to his feet and take a few staggering steps, so that was good. It took so much out of him that he had to sit back down on the ground to catch his breath. That was less good. Bleakly, Lovett recalled that his car was parked at least two miles away.

The second time he had to sit down, something grated in his chest and the pain was so sharp he nearly passed out again. This wasn't working. Lovett needed help. He eased his phone from his pocket. Miraculously, it was cracked, but still functional. Presumably, his body had absorbed most of the impact of the fall. 

Lovett considered calling an Uber. If he could get someone to drop him back at his house, he could lick his wounds in peace and try and assess the damage. But he was a mess, and more than that, he was scared. Before he could talk himself out of it, he was calling the most comforting, reliable person in driving distance that he could think of.

He picked up almost at once.

"L'vett?" Jon's confused, sleep-muffled voice was like a balm from another, much less terrifying reality. "What tim'sit?"

"Late," Lovett rasped. He sounded so obviously terrible that that one syllable seemed to wake Jon up.

"Are you okay?" Very clearly, Lovett could picture him blinking himself into some semblance of awareness. In their all-nighter speechwriting days, he'd had a habit of shaking his head like a dog to wake himself up.

Lovett shifted so he was sitting straighter against the wall. It made it a little easier to talk, but also squeezed an involuntary groan out of his chest. "Mostly," he gasped.

"What does ‘mostly’ mean? Do you need me to come over?" Jon still sounded purely concerned, not yet fully aware of the imposition and irregularity of Lovett’s upcoming request. 

"No. I mean. Yes. Can you come get me?" Lovett’s voice cracked like the immature teenager whose lines he was lifting. He felt like a teenager. He was in so far over his head, and there were so many big decisions to make, and given that his choices had led him to lying in an alleyway with an indeterminate number of internal injuries, Lovett knew he was handling those decisions poorly. More than a lift, Lovett wanted someone else to take over. Someone he trusted. Just for a few hours.

"Come get you? You're not at home?"

"I. I'm not.” It was too much to explain. Lovett could only beg. “Can you please, please come get me?" 

Somehow, it hadn't occurred to Lovett until this moment that Jon might turn him away, but he didn't have to live with that fear for long. Jon's response was swift and sure. "Where are you?"

Shock at the condition Lovett was in won him a brief grace period, but somewhere between bed and the suspiciously gooey puddle he’d had to scoop Lovett out of, Jon found his anger.

"What the hell happened? What were you even doing here in the middle of the night?" He was driving, for him, kind of recklessly.

"Um. There's a great bakery—"

"Cut the crap Lovett! You've been avoiding me for weeks, you can order cake to your house if you want it, and you look like someone beat the shit out of you."

"No one beat the shit out of me," Lovett replied, sullenly. The ground didn't count. The ground won every fight.

"Then what the hell is this?" Jon took a hand off the wheel to wave at Lovett's sorry, bruised state.

"Careful," escaped unbidden from Lovett's mouth. The roads were quiet, but it was still LA, and unlike Lovett Jon was not practiced at driving and gesticulating.

"Don't fucking talk to me about being careful!"

He had a point there. And he deserved an answer. It was clear, in Jon's heaving chest and wild eyes, that he was more terrified than angry. That didn't make it any easier for Lovett to come up with an excuse. His head was ringing and his body was worse than one big bruise, more like a thousand layered over each other. It made it hard to think clearly. Which was probably why he didn't absorb where they were going until they pulled up at a hospital.

"No hospital," Lovett groaned. Superheroes didn't go to hospitals. For reasons. His head was too fuzzy to articulate why, but questions had something to do with it. "Bed."

"_No hospital_?" Jon repeated, in astonished tones. "Have you _seen_ yourself?" He got out and walked round to Lovett's door, face set. "This is not even slightly a negotiation."

The something in Lovett's chest grated again, painful and mysterious and scary, and any will to fight drained away. He must have known on some level that this is what calling Jon would mean. Having the choice taken out of his hands was probably why he'd done it.

An efficient fifteen hours later, Lovett was grudgingly released with a you'll-live bill of health and a prescription for some shockingly strong painkillers. Jon was waiting to pick him up again, calmer and much harder to read.

"What's the damage?" he asked, as Lovett eased himself into the car. 

"Dislocated shoulder, wrenched knee, a few cracked ribs, bruis—" based on Jon's expression, Lovett trimmed the list of bruised organs down, "—ing. But they said I'll be fine." Rather than look at Jon's face anymore, Lovett stared at his swollen knee. In the cold light of day he felt a lot guiltier about getting Jon involved.

"You told them you were in a car accident."

"I did."

Unsurprisingly, given that he had picked him up sans car from the wet and sticky ground, Jon looked even less convinced about this story than the doctor had, but he didn't press Lovett, and they drove the rest of the way back to Lovett’s house in silence. Exhausted, comforted by Jon's presence even at his most forbidding, Lovett half drifted off. He nearly fell out of the car when Jon opened his door.

"Thank you," Lovett said, once he'd wobbled to his house with Jon hovering behind him. "I'm really sorry about all of this."

"Uh huh," Jon replied, tailgating Lovett through his front door. He strode past him into the living room. 

"What are you—" Lovett looked around his living room. Something was different. "Did you clean up in here? Where's Pundit?"

"Andy took the dogs for a walk. And yeah, I cleaned up. It seemed weirder to search your whole house and put things back messy."

"You searched my house?" Another time, Lovett would have had a good laugh over the fact that Jon's version of ransacking involved leaving a place nicer than it was when he found it, but for now he was stuck on outrage. “What the fuck?”

"I had to google what meth paraphernalia looks like, thanks for that addition to my search history by the way."

"You think I'm on meth?"

"I think something is going on that you won't talk about! You're asleep half the day, you look like shit, you never want to hang out anymore, and now you're apparently wandering the streets in the middle of the night getting injured, so yeah, I thought you might be on drugs."

Put that way, it sounded eminently reasonable. Lovett limped his way over to the couch and started to lower himself onto it. Halfway down, one of his legs started to go.

"Let me—" Jon darted over and grasped Lovett's arm.

"No I'm fine," Lovett insisted, but Jon had already helped him ease down. "Thank you," he said instead, voice small.

Jon sighed and sat down next to him.

"What did you find?" Lovett asked. As much as the idea of Jon searching his house made him feel guilty and slightly panicked, he didn't think there was anything incriminating to find. Embarrassing, yes, but the ship had sailed on that one. The closest to a thing that might give him away was an extremely scrappy bit of paper with Bolt's number on it, somehow still in his assorted junk drawer several house moves later, but that would be easily dismissed.

"Nothing. A few joints. Smoking is still bad for you, you know." Jon sounded tired. He must have been up all night too, even after he could have gone to bed, combing through the corners of Lovett's house, trying to find a way to save him from himself. Hurting and exhausted, at the mercy of a wave of tenderness and guilt that that thought conjured up, Lovett nearly burst into tears.

"Those are old. I'm out of edibles."

Jon laughed, just a little, and even in the midst of this intense scene of melodrama, it made Lovett feel a little warmer inside. "I promise, that's not it."

"There's something going on though?" Jon looked at him searchingly. "At first I thought things were getting better. You haven't picked a late night fight with an idiot on Twitter in ages, and walking into a door must be a classic cover up because it happens sometimes, right? But it keeps happening and it keeps getting worse.”

Lovett didn’t say anything. Until yesterday, he had thought things were getting better. Now he wasn't so sure. 

“I’m worried about you,” Jon explained, needlessly. Concern was etched into every line of his face. “I’ve even had nightmares about it.”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” Lovett said, sick with guilt. Jon was having nightmares about him? Selfishly, horribly, it hadn’t really occurred to Lovett that he’d noticed anything was going on. Even he could forget that Jon was not as happily oblivious as he sometimes appeared.

“I wish that was true. Whatever happened last night, it was serious. You could have been really hurt." You could have died, went unspoken.

All the things he that he wanted to say crammed into Lovett's throat, but they were too numerous, too pathetic, too weird, too true, to be let out. 

I'm a failure. 

I can't do anything except this and I suck at that too. 

Do you remember that time before we knew each other, when we both nearly died? Well...

He had to say something. "It's stupid," Lovett prevaricated. 

"You can tell me." Jon put a careful hand on Lovett's knee. The good one, because he was kind and observant and trustworthy that way. 

"I haven't written anything,” slipped out. “Not for months."

"I thought you were working on—"

"Nothing. And I can't sleep, and people keep asking me what I'm working on, and I've promised people things! Important people! Actual pitches with meetings attached that I have to keep delaying! But I can't even go into my office, let alone create anything.” Now that he was talking about some part of it, Lovett couldn't stop. It was all spilling out, faster and faster. “I have nothing to say, I left my dream job to have nothing to say, and—" 

"Hey,” Jon soothed, before Lovett could work himself up even further, “slow down.” 

Lovett took a few deep steadying breaths. That had been a bit more of the truth of it than he’d been intending to let out. 

“We can talk about that,” Jon said, “but what does it have to do with last night?"

Lovett put his face in his hands. Not looking at Jon seemed like the only way he'd get the next part out. "I couldn't sleep, and at a certain point weed and video games and empanadas reach their limits, you know? I had to get out of the house before I fused to this couch. I was going for walks, then I started, um, trespassing."

"Trespassing?"

"Breaking into abandoned buildings to look around.” There was a name for it, Lovett knew there was. “Urban exploration!” he said, too loudly. It sounded even stupider said aloud than it did in his head, but he was committed now. "It's exciting! There's a whole community!" Okay Lovett, reign it in.

"So you’re doing it with friends?" Jon looked confused, but not necessarily like he thought he was being presented with a crock of shit. 

"No." Fuck. "An online community."

"And last night—"

"I was looking around this abandoned warehouse. Real good, um, atmosphere and cobwebs and stuff." Lovett wished he'd had the chance to do some research on this cover story he'd come up with on the fly, rather than relying on a memory of an article he'd read once. "And I fell through the floor."

"You fell through the floor!" Jon looked aghast.

"Just one story. I told you it was stupid," Lovett muttered. Jon opened his mouth, no doubt to open his heart to entreat Lovett to rethink his reckless adventuring ways, and Lovett didn't think he could stand it. "The point is, I'm going to cut back." Jon opened his mouth again. "I mean, I'm going to stop. Believe it or not, I have not enjoyed the last twenty-four hours."

"Good," Jon gifted him with a small, still stunning smile. "Pundit is too young to be an orphan."

"Exactly," Lovett agreed. "Could you um," now that the lie had been sold the lump of guilt was back, wedged solidly in his throat, "help me get up? I'm gonna go to bed."

"Of course." Jon shephered Lovett all the way back to his bed, and clearly barely restrained himself from tucking Lovett in. "I'll bring Pundit and dinner over later, okay?"

"Great."

"And we can brainstorm, if you want. It'll be just like old times. Writer's block happens to everyone, ask Tommy and me and our non existent TV show. We can conference him in! He’ll be relieved to know why you’ve been, I mean, what’s been going on."

With difficulty, Lovett bit back a demand that Jon not tell Tommy about this. It sounded like he and Jon had already discussed it and, as much as the humiliation of the two of them having hushed, worried conversations about him burned, and as little as Lovett wanted to tangle Tommy deeper into this web of deception next to Jon, the offer was well meant. Not to mention that Lovett’s credibility was at an all time low. From somewhere, he managed to dredge up a wan smile and hold it until Jon was gone. 

Once Jon had left, Lovett felt worse than ever. A couple of months ago, this could have been a genuine conversation that brought them closer together. Maybe it could have even helped. A lot had happened since then, his secrets had mutated, and instead there were lies spackled over the evasions and omissions already between them and Lovett was alone, a thicker wall than ever before surrounding him.

Despite what he’d told Jon, Lovett didn't stop. He almost really intended to, but after a couple of days of genuinely barely being able to move more than a few feet, and a few more of the dark, useless feeling he’d so recently escaped surging back in, he _had_ to get out. He didn't want to go back to the place he'd been in.

It was possible, however, that Lovett had gone out a bit soon. It had been easy enough to draw a man that had been harassing some women outside a club to a more secluded location. He was spoiling for a fight with someone and very happy to come discuss the matter further with Lovett away from prying eyes. The second stage of subduing him was proving a bit harder. Partially because Lovett couldn't lift his arms higher than his shoulders and partially because, as well as being drunk, belligerent, and able to throw a punch, the guy had a gun.

Aiming seemed to elude him, so Lovett was not entirely panicking when someone shouted, "Hey!", and distracted them both. They both looked towards the direction the voice had come from, but there was no one there. Lovett recovered faster, and reached out to grab the gun from the guy's hands.

Drunk creep was still blinking at his empty hands, confused, when a strange blur materialized in the air in front of him. His head whipped back, and he fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Potatoes that groaned and rolled around a little. Lovett gaped at him in mute confusion. He hadn't done that. At least, he didn't think he had.

Abruptly, there was someone else there. Tall, wrapped thoroughly in bright blue spandex and nothing else, and _there_.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" boomed Bolt. His voice really did boom, because sometime in the almost-a-decade since they’d last met, he'd developed a dumb, Christian Bale Batman voice. It must be new. Lovett was sure he would have noticed that if he'd been doing it last time. 

But hang on. Forget what the hell Lovett was doing here, what was _Bolt_ doing here? It made no sense on any level, from how he knew about Lovett's new vigilante habit to if he remembered Lovett and why he'd give a shit either way. No one, not even Lovett, could possibly imagine he was about to be recruited for some kind of big-time superhero league. He hadn't exactly distinguished himself so far. In short, Lovett had a lot of questions. What came out, more snippily than he’d intended, was, "I had it under control."

Now that he'd said it, he was sure he had. Lovett bent the gun into an unusable shape to underline his point. The creep from the club, gasped, scrambled to a half crouch, and staggered away. 

"For the record, when I said to call me if anything weird happened, the ability to crush guns with your hands is exactly the sort of thing that I was referring to," Bolt said, as if he was picking up a recent conversation, and not a comment he'd made to a barely conscious man _seven years ago_.

Lovett's head was spinning. "I have so many questions."

"Likewise." Bolt crossed his arms across his chest and looked down at Lovett like a disappointed parent. He was even taller and buffer than Lovett remembered, but Lovett had experience rising above that kind of thing. He lived in LA now.

"I guess the question of whether you're any less of an asshole nowadays has been answered." The old resentment at the callous way Bolt had treated him, barely even like an afterthought, bubbled up, as fresh and hot as ever. How dare he look disappointed in Lovett? He had no right to judge him. He fucking abandoned him to possibly die in a random hotel room.

Bolt uncrossed his arms. "I didn't mean it like that."

"How did you even find me?"

"When a new vigilante pops up, people talk."

They did? About him? Not anywhere Lovett had seen it. "But how did you know it was me?" he asked, not wanting to admit ignorance about the hero dark web or whatever.

"I didn't know. I wanted to make sure the new guy wasn't going to get killed. Or kill anyone.” Bolt looked Lovett up and down. “Although your costume isn't exactly impregnable."

Lovett tugged his bandana mask, which had been sagging a little, down and griped, "We can't all pull off full-body spandex." He was aware he sounded a little like a sulky child, which wasn’t exactly the collegial vibe he might have chosen if he hadn't been blindsided like this. As it was, the needy, grudge-bearing part of him seemed to be calling the shots. It said churlish little things like, "I'm surprised you remember me, let alone recognize me."

Churlish or not, that seemed to hit a nerve. The tone of Bolt's voice when he asked, "Is that why you didn't call me?" was decidedly less pompous and overbearing.

Lovett shrugged.

Bolt's inscrutable shiny eyes gleamed down at him. His shoulders slumped a little. "I'm sorry I let you get"—he waved a hand up and down Lovett—"you know." Which was nice, but not actually the part Lovett was upset about. On the bomb, he knew he’d done his best. 

"And for abandoning me in a hotel room with no medical assistance?" he prompted, pressing his luck. He half expected Bolt to storm off in response. That seemed to be the kind of person he was. 

"And for leaving you there like that,” Bolt conceded instead. “I should have explained properly. I'd seen a version of that stuff before, and most people die on contact, but if you don't, you're fine. Sometimes you're fine but... different. Either way, hordes of doctors and FBI agents poking at you didn't seem like a good idea."

The last of Lovett’s affront deflated. That actually made sense. Lovett considered how to proceed. On the one hand, he still had some pointers on Bolt's bedside manner and aftercare, concentrated by years of simmering bitterness. On the other hand, he'd never had the chance to actually talk to another powered person before, and he wasn't sure when it would come around again. 

"Apology accepted," Lovett said, going with benevolence. He immediately felt better. Under the spandex, it was possible Bolt smiled at him. It was hard to tell.

The moment didn't last long. "Which brings us back to what the fuck you were doing." 

"With great power comes gre—"

"It's been seven years!" 

"Well, with great power and more free time comes more opportunity to take up your great responsibility."

Bolt rubbed his forehead, which was a bit of non-verbal communication that Lovett could read even through a full face mask. "You're going to get yourself killed."

"I know we haven't done the full rundown of our powers, but I'm tougher than I look."

Like a heat-seeking missile, Bolt's finger darted out and poked Lovett right in his cracked ribs.

"Motherf—" Lovett doubled over.

"I don't want your death on my conscience.” Bolt dropped his voice to a quieter rumble, still comically deep, but also gentle. Coaxing. “You don't need to do this. Just go back to pretending none of this ever happened. You'll be safe."

"I'm helping people," Lovett insisted. 

"So go volunteer, give money to charity."

Lovett crossed his arms and glared. He still had the full power of facial expressions on his side.

Bolt tipped his head back. Again, Lovett didn't need to see his face to recognise his old friend, exasperation. He had that effect on a lot of people. "Fucking stubborn," Bolt muttered. After a moment, he took a deep breath. "Okay, what are we working with here? What are your powers?"

"None of your—"

"I'm trying to help you!" Bolt burst out, so stridently that it shut Lovett up. After years of assuming he hadn't cared, it was a bit of an adjustment to see him so het up over Lovett's safety, of all things. "You're strong, great. Anything else?"

It was probably a tactic to pump information from him. But what the hell. This was all very terrifying to do alone. Maybe Lovett could do with an outside opinion. "I'm not invulnerable, but. Well, yes, I have a couple of cracked ribs and bruises but er, I fell four stories—"

"Jesus Christ."

"—so I probably should have died." Lovett risked a glance at Bolt. He was covering his face with both his hands. Great to be a disappointment as a vigilante to other people as well himself, just great. "So blunt-force trauma is less of an issue, but like, knives and stuff can still be a problem," he finished at a mumble.

"Bullets?" Bolt was still listening then.

"Haven't tried them."

Bolt took a heavy, put upon breath. "Well, first you need a better costume."

"If all you've got is image advice," Lovett started heatedly. _He_ could have told himself that. He was going to get to it _later_. 

"Something with Kevlar," Bolt raised his voice to talk over Lovett, "since weight isn’t an issue. Something that's subtle enough not to draw too much attention, but covers your face more reliably. I'm guessing you don't want people to figure out who you are."

"_Subtle_ says the guy wearing a gimp mask with built in shades."

"Yeah, learn from my early design errors." Bolt shot back. He touched his mask self-consciously. "You have no idea how much dust gets in your eyes when you're running at thousands of miles an hour. And bugs."

That was a peril Lovett hadn't considered. Maybe there was a method to the madness. "Where do I get Kevlar?"

"I know a guy. Well, a girl actually. She can make you something."

"Thanks." Lovett would feel better with an extra layer of protection between him and the bullets he'd so far managed to avoid.

"Second, you're injured. You should be at home."

"I'm _fine_." Lovett bristled again.

Bolt aimed a threatening finger at Lovett's chest. "Don't make me poke you twice. This whole thing is stupid, but coming out here at anything less than a hundred percent is even stupider."

In retrospect, Lovett had perhaps taken himself off desk duty a little early.

"Third, take some self-defence lessons, Jesus. You're either going to run into someone who has some moves, or," he nodded at the ruined gun, "you're going to crush someone's skull without meaning to."

Accidentally killing someone was one of Lovett's biggest fears in this whole thing. However long he'd had these powers, he still didn't think of himself as the strongest man in the room.

"You're not going to put me in touch with your sensei?" he teased, only half joking.

"I'm sure LA has some Krav Maga classes somewhere."

Bolt's advice was both good and embarrassingly basic, so Lovett decided to swallow his pride and take it. When reframed as a tactical timeout rather than a defeat, a couple more weeks not attempting to punch people sounded quite inviting. 

Learning more sophisticated fighting skills than punching and throwing cake sounded even better. There were indeed a plethora of available classes in LA, from group classes on basic self-defence to one on one Aikido tuition, and like an aspiring starlet, Lovett had a lot of free time on his hands during the day. He had his pick of them. 

Most of them were cardio dressed up fancy, but between the gimmicks and the glamour muscles, there was a wealth of skill and knowledge tucked away in LA's gyms and yoga studios. Once he started actually applying himself, Lovett was kind of amazed at how fast he picked the techniques up. It almost validated all the training montages he'd scoffed at over the years. In his head he was still the short, physically awkward kid getting picked last for dodgeball. In reality, mysterious green fog had given him an unnatural physical advantage.

The biggest problem that Lovett encountered was holding back. Hitting the ubiquitous foam pads that people kept asking him to punch at even half strength was out of the question. He quickly got good at lingering at the back of the room, but sometimes embarrassing displays slipped through. In one particularly disastrous class, Lovett accidentally shattered a plank of wood with his bare hand on the first try, ruining what he was pretty sure had been intended as an example of how impossible it was to do before you’d been given any instructions.

_The entire first row got covered in sawdust_ he texted to Bolt on the way out. They were Signal contacts now. _I had to pretend I'd been looking for the advanced group and run away while the instructor was still sneezing uncontrollably_.

_That's funny,_ Bolt replied. Lovett had decided to find his stilted way of expressing emotions via text endearing. As long as people let him know his jokes were landing somehow, he was all set. _But you don't need to learn how to hit harder. You need to know how to fight without using your strength too much_.

Huh. That made sense. The next day, Lovett joined a self-defence class at his local community centre. He got thrown around by what felt like everyone else in the class, constantly called upon as the lone man in attendance to play the role of ‘assailant’, but it was also undeniably useful. He had ample opportunity to practice how to fall and to learn to use the steady, predictable force of gravity to flip and restrain people, rather than his own inexplicable muscles. 

It turned out having a mentor was incredibly helpful. Even just having someone to talk to about this stuff, openly and honestly with no secrets and evasions, was like a weight being lifted. The serious advice, and the small, petty things he’d never been able to mention to anyone. 

_When the floor is the safest place to store your clothes_, Lovett texted one morning, along with a picture of his dresser, every drawer but one knocked wonky. Hitting things hard occasionally was throwing off his whole calibration, and he used most of his concentration on not destroying living things or making scenes in public.

_When you blame your slovenly nature on your superpowers_, Bolt replied, which was fair. Lovett had been operating a complex multi-pile clothes storage system since his mom stopped cleaning his room.

_One time_, Bolt followed up, _I ran for a bus and accidentally ended up thirty miles away with torn dress pants._

See, that was the kind of solidarity and understanding Lovett couldn't find anywhere else. _I hope you were wearing decent underwear_, he sent.

_I wish I’d been wearing any underwear_.

Lovett laughed out loud and replied with a peach emoji. 

Eventually, Lovett regained full range of movement in all his limbs and Jon stopped anxiously springing up from his chair to pass him things. He figured he was ready to hit the streets again. 

_Are you sure?_ Bolt asked, when Lovett texted him. 

_Don’t fuss,_ Lovett replied, kind of loving the fussing. _I’m all healed up_.

_I’ll come down and join you._

Lovett blinked in confusion at his phone. 

_It’ll be fun_, Bolt followed up. 

_All the way from Iowa?_

_I'm a fast traveller._

The warm glow Lovett felt at his concern was just. You know. A mentor glow.

True to his word, Bolt arrived not long after sunset. To Lovett’s disappointment, he was already firmly sealed (buttoned? zipped?) up in his suit. Given that he knew Lovett’s face, name, occupation and street address, and they seemed to be friends now, he’d been hoping for at least a glimpse of an eyebrow. A flash of an ankle. Maybe next time. Bolt had brought a bag, which was new. 

“Staying the night?” Lovett asked. “You can if you want.” If he did, would Bolt sleep in his suit? Would he take the mask off to brush his teeth if Lovett left the room? An image of Bolt wearing old-timey striped pajamas and a nightcap over his blue spandex, snuggling down into Lovett’s sofa with a blanket, popped into his head. He decided not to share it. 

“It’s for you.”

Inside the bag was what appeared to be a hoodie, except when Lovett took it out of the bag, it was heavier than any hoodie he’d ever felt. It was charcoal colored, and the fabric of it draped like an expensive suit. “Is this...”

“Bulletproof?” Which hadn’t been exactly what Lovett was going to ask, but it was exciting information. “Mostly. She had to strike a balance between strength and flexibility, but it should be effective against most things except high calibre bullets and extremely close range shots.”

“Wow. Thank you,” Lovett pulled it on over his t-shirt. It was reassuringly weighty on his shoulders, but when he looked in the mirror, it looked like an upmarket twist on a normal hoodie. “This is amazing!” 

As ever, since Lovett couldn't see it, Bolt’s face was literally inscrutable, but his voice was warm when he added, “the hood is different too.”

The hood, Lovett discovered, had an extra section he could pull up over his face, so only his eyes were visible. “Wow,” Lovett repeated. He’d never felt so equipped to fight crime. Or so cool. Even if you didn’t know it was cutting edge body armour technology, it was a very nice piece of clothing. It was one of the best gifts he'd ever been given and not, he assumed, cheap. “How much do I owe—"

“Nothing,” Bolt interrupted. “It’s a gift. A long overdue ‘sorry you got blown up’, ‘welcome to the club’ gift.”

“You sure know how to make a guy feel special,” Lovett said, meaning it.

Walking by Venice Beach after dark, ostensibly on the lookout for pickpockets and ne'er-do-wells, Lovett had to keep reminding himself that this was not a date. Yes, the water was lovely. And yes, in deference to Lovett’s slower, more visible pace Bolt had put one of Lovett's sweatshirts on over his costume and it was doing strange things to Lovett’s stomach. But this was serious business, and as well as feeling like the quarterback had asked him to prom, Lovett had an intense desire to prove himself competent and capable. He needed to concentrate. 

“Shall—" Bolt’s voice cracked. He cleared his throat and started again, “shall we try somewhere else? It's quiet here tonight.”

“Sure.” This whole voice thing was stupid. "No one ever talks about how dumb you sound."

“Excuse me?” Bolt sounded affronted, and like his vocal cords were sore from grinding unnaturally against each other. 

"You can drop the Batman voice, I'm genuinely worried about your vocal cords." And you can trust me, Lovett didn’t say. 

“Maybe this is how I talk.”

No one talked like that, but sure, if that was the way he wanted to play it. Perhaps Bolt was a famous billionaire, and he thought Lovett might recognise his voice. "Are you a famous billionaire?"

“No,” Bolt replied, voice gravelly and pissy.

Lovett was about to try and parlay this into an impromptu game of twenty questions and some actual biographical information, but an alarm started ringing in the distance. Ah. Work.

"Do you hear that?" Lovett asked.

"Yeah. I'll go check it out." Bolt peeled off the sweatshirt and, with a blur and a breeze, he was gone, leaving Lovett’s clothes in a pile on the ground, which was a little rude. Lovett started running towards the alarm at a more normal pace. He'd only gone ten feet or so before Bolt was back.

"Four armed robbers in a jewelry shop a couple of blocks back, plus a driver outside. They came in through the front, and they're about to blast into the safe. Blunt but professional."

Professional armed robbers sounded way over Lovett's pay grade, which was literally nothing. "Should we call the police?" he blurted, and immediately felt like an idiot. 

"Your call, but it's a smash and grab, they'll be out of here in a few minutes." Bolt was almost vibrating he was so keen, but Lovett hesitated. This was a lot. He hadn't dealt with anything even half as organized as a crew of criminals with explosives and guns. But if not now, when? He had backup—or more realistically, he was the backup—and if it was the jewelry shop he was thinking of, it was a family business, a real person's livelihood, not just some corporation that would swallow the costs until the insurance claim came back.

"To be clear, we're not killing anyone?" Lovett probably should have had the conversation about boundaries before they went on patrol together, but better late than never.

"Of course not. Not even maiming. Strictly subduing, maybe some light bondage."

There was a distant boom. They were probably into the safe. Lovett pulled the bottom half of his mask up. "Let's do it."

The front window of the shop had been smashed, and a van with no plates was idling outside. Inside, two men were shoveling items from display cases into black duffel bags, and two more were crouched by a safe in the back. All of them were wearing black and had some kind of military looking rifle that Lovett did not have the expertise to be more specific about. Wearily, he added gun types to the growing list of shit he had to develop a basic working knowledge of.

"Hi," Bolt rumbled in his dumb, sexy, fake voice.

As well as splattering bugs like a windscreen, the costume was good for shock and awe. There was a split second of confusion that accompanied the arrival of six-foot-something of vivid blue spandex, enough time for Bolt to blur away, leaving the armed burglars even more alarmed.

Maybe Lovett's senses were dialed up, or maybe his brain was getting better at filling in the confusing sensory input of Bolt's power, but he was sure he could see a blue blur whipping around the outside of the room. Something brushed the back of his neck and whispered "catch" and less than a second later, one of the burglar's guns was flying towards Lovett. He caught it with both hands and bent the barrel in one smooth motion, as if they'd practiced it.

"What the fuck," one of the others said, but his gun was already sailing across the room to Lovett, the third following it so swiftly he barely had time bend and drop the previous one. The fourth guy seemed to catch on, wrapping an arm tight around his so it couldn't be grabbed, but he found himself flat on his back instead, Bolt standing behind him. Lovett walked over, pried the gun away as easily as taking candy from a baby (he took a moment to appreciate one of the rare times that that simile thoroughly worked) and tossed it, twisted and useless, onto the pile of other guns. Bolt nodded at him approvingly and blurred away again.

One of the burglars suddenly teetered and fell to the floor, wrists and ankles locked together by what looked like zip ties. The others scrambled for the window. Lovett watched in admiration as one went down before he could climb through, feet flying together, then hands. He followed the other two through the broken window and saw the third take a tumble halfway to the van, but the fourth made it in. Lovett darted towards the back of the van.

"Go for god's sake!" the fourth guy screamed at the driver. Lovett grabbed the bumper with both hands and lifted. He was a little worried, this was probably the heaviest thing he'd ever attempted to lift, but it came up with only a little effort. The engine gunned, but the van went nowhere, back wheels spinning uselessly in mid-air.

"Nice," Bolt said, approvingly.

"Are you gonna wrap this up or not?" Lovett could lift the van, but holding it up was kind of annoying, like standing on the stairs with a large, unwieldy box while your friend futzed about for their keys. Faintly, he could hear the sound of sirens.

"I was just admiring your technique." Bolt zipped away again. The driver's side door flew open, the engine cut out, and a set of keys sailed out. Lovett dropped the van, shoulders aching a little, and ran round to the passenger side door just in time to slam it shut with the fourth burglar still inside. He slammed a hand into the lock mechanism, denting it. The burglar watched with bulging eyes.

By now, the sirens were almost on them. "We should get out of here," Lovett hissed to Bolt, who was zip tying the driver to the steering wheel at normal speed.

"Right, I forgot about your deficiencies," Bolt replied, but Lovett could hear the smile in his voice, couldn't help smiling back at him. It was a good thing he had a mask on. It was probably unprofessional to be having this good a time at a crime scene. "Do you want me to give you a lift?"

"No fucking way." Lovett did not want to end this evening with super-speed induced travel sickness.

The two of them sprinted away at Lovett's pace, which was pretty good for someone who didn't have a specific speed-based superpower actually, and they didn't stop till the sound of sirens had completely faded. Lovett turned them into a quiet, empty alleyway.

"Wow," Lovett puffed, out of breath, and pulled his mask down. "That was. I've never um, taken on something like before."

"You surprise me," Bolt replied, dry as a bone. He, of course, was as unruffled as if he'd taken a short stroll across the room. Any irritation Lovett might have felt was soothed when he shifted, a small but awkward aborted motion, and admitted, "I've never had a partner before."

"Likewise, I would never have guessed. If partner is even the right word." Sidekick was probably more appropriate.

"I warned you before I threw the first gun," Bolt protested.

"And I appreciated you including me, even at apprentice level." Lovett was not complaining about the training wheels, far from it, but he was under no illusion as to who the key part of that whole endeavor had been.

"Hey," Bolt stepped closer and put a hand on Lovett's shoulder, big and warm. "You were fantastic. I probably wouldn't have gotten those last two if you hadn't been there. Once a vehicle is moving, it’s dangerous to get in."

A warm flush of pleasure and embarrassment suffused Lovett's body at the praise, mixing with the lingering adrenaline. He started to wish he had a full face mask. He was sure he must be as pink as Tommy when he was two beers in and someone made a good joke. 

"Where do you even keep those zip ties?" He asked, both as a distraction and out of genuine curiosity. That suit was skin-fucking-tight.

"Concealed pocket." Bolt patted his hip. Lovett eyes followed the motion, and got sort of stuck on the miles of torso that were only one whisper thin layer of fabric away. In the dim street light, you could barely even make out the absurd color.

It was hard to read the situation when he couldn't see Bolt's face, but he was standing close. Staying close. His breath sounded heavier, and Lovett knew it wasn’t exertion. 

Lovett's heart was beating hard, every pulse of it singing along his skin. It was the usual post-rescue high, the kind that took a ten-mile run to burn off. Today, there was someone else here. A hot, kinda mean, extremely competent someone else. Lovett was drawn, inexorably, to explore another avenue for expelling all this pent up energy. Crazily, it almost seemed like Bolt wouldn't hate the idea.

Hoping that he wasn't going to fuck this up too badly, Lovett put a hand on Bolt's hip, more of a caress than a pat. Not, Lovett could admit to himself, even a little to check out the pocket. "I’m surprised you can squeeze anything else in that thing," Lovett said, with embarrassing Marilyn Monroe breathiness. He didn't move his hand away.

With a shuddering breath, Bolt pushed Lovett backward. Not, Lovett realized with a thrill of anticipation as his back hit the wall, to push him away, but to press them flush against each other. Even apart from that pretty clear signal, Lovett could feel another unmistakable sign that Bolt was interested. 

He put a hand on Bolt’s face and rubbed a thumb where his mouth was, hidden under his mask. It felt like Bolt parted his lips. Lovett wanted to kiss him more than he’d ever wanted anything, felt crazy with it. 

“If you’re secretly made of rock like Thing, I promise not to scream and run away.” As far as he could tell through the fabric, Bolt had the soft give of human skin, but Lovett was willing to work around almost anything. He pulled Bolt’s head down so he could press their faces together, opened his mouth against the edge of his jaw, sharp even through the fabric. He thought he could feel the gentle dampness of Bolt exhaling against his cheek. 

“God,” Bolt whispered, “you are so.” Whatever he was, Lovett didn’t get to hear it, because Bolt pushed the bottom of his mask up and kissed him. His lips, thank God, were not made of rock. They were pink and pretty, from the quick glimpse Lovett got of them before they were on his, slick, and warm, and intent. 

Bolt hitched him higher against the wall and rocked his hips against Lovett, sending a shot of arousal through him. Lovett dropped a hand to where Bolt was hard against him, scrabbling to get a hand on him. If he wasn’t allowed to see Bolt’s face, he at least wanted to get a good look at his dick. Unfortunately, this was easier said than done. Lovett pulled his lips away from Bolt’s so he could focus fully on the problem at hand, but it didn’t help. 

“Please tell me this suit has some kind of quick draw fly I just can’t figure out”. This must be how heterosexual boys felt the first time they encountered a bra. He didn’t like it. 

“Let me—" Bolt pulled away to fumble at whatever mysterious mechanisms were going on down there which, thankfully, did enable him to get his dick out. Lovett dropped to his knees. He intended to take full advantage of this fact. 

“Lovett—" Bolt started, but the rest of whatever he was going to say was lost in a gasp as Lovett, with a perhaps outsized sense of relief, finally got his mouth on him and took him deep. He wanted to keep his eyes open and absorb all the details he could, listen to every moan and shudder for traces of Bolt’s real voice and signs that Lovett was making him feel good. But involuntarily, his eyes were closing, his heartbeat rushing ever louder in his ears as his whole world narrowed down to this. It was just so fucking good. 

How long Lovett was lost to it, he wasn’t sure, but then Bolt was pulling him off, even as Lovett protested, and dropping to his knees as well, so he could put a hand on either side Lovett’s face and pull him in for a hard, desperate kiss, tongue pressing in so deep it was like he wanted to make Lovett’s mouth his. “So good,” Bolt whispered, pressing his lips again and again to Lovett’s, “that was so fucking good. I have to—" he went for Lovett’s fly, fumbling a little even though Lovett’s set up was perfectly fucking normal, until he had both of them in his big hand. That was a good fucking idea. Bolt had the best plans. His gloved hand was cool and silk-scarf smooth, but his cock was hot and human, as he kissed Lovett, and jerked him just right until, with a gasp, he came. 

That night Lovett slept the sleep of the righteous and well-fucked. He woke up with that rare feeling of having rested the exact right amount, stretched, and rolled over to scoop Pundit, miraculously not fussing to be taken out, into his arms for a morning cuddle. It wasn't quite a perfect morning—as much as Lovett loved to cuddle his dog she was not his first choice of companion in this moment—but it was damn close. Lovett's stomach fluttered at the thought of his preferred bed companion, like a goddamn teenager. Bolt wasn't here, but that didn't mean there was no way for Lovett to satisfy the itch to talk to him. He reached for his phone.

_So last night was_, Lovett chewed his lip, trying to find a word that struck the right balance between playing it cool and encapsulating how hot and repeatable he’d found it, _something else_. 

He reread it. Shit. Maybe that was too cool. _Please feel free to come back any time_. He considered and discarded a winky face emoji.

_Yeah, last night was fantastic,_ Bolt replied. Lovett smiled, but then a second message appeared. _There's nothing like successfully foiling a crime_, which was… less promising. As thrilling as it had been, Lovett’s main takeaway from that night had not been the win for justice.

Was that it? Lovett cursed the lack of typing indicators on Signal. It took several long seconds for, _it was great having a friend to share that with for once_ to pop up.

A friend. The happy, anticipatory bubble in Lovett’s chest deflated. Of course he was reading too much into last night. As intoxicating and funny and supportive and sexy as Bolt was, he had the kind of trust issues that Lovett's worst unmasked date could only dream of replicating. He lived somewhere between one and a half and two thousand miles away. Lovett couldn't be more specific because he wasn't completely certain what state Bolt lived in. He didn’t even want Lovett to know what he sounded like. Bolt had made it incredibly clear in every way he could that Lovett could come this close (not even that close!) but no further.

Them hooking up had been about blowing off steam, that was all. Their adrenaline had been high and they'd worked so well together against the burglars that there had been a lot of steam to blow. Thinking back, it was actually kind of embarrassing, the way that Lovett had thrown himself at Bolt, rubbing up and panting against him like a cat in heat who lost all sense of professionalism at the first taste of victory. It was a wonder Bolt was still texting him, let alone calling him a friend. 

_Like I said, anytime_ Lovett replied. It would be the cherry of complete loss of dignity on the humiliation sundae if he let his own stupid inflated expectations sour whatever relationship Bolt was willing to offer.

* * *

_2016, Los Angeles_

The slight fear that Lovett had that Bolt would ghost him proved unfounded, virtually at least. Month after month, they kept in touch, sometimes texting multiple times a day. Coming to LA, though, seemed to be more of a one-time final test of his fitness for the office. No matter many times Lovett hinted that they should work together again, or quizzed Bolt playfully about how long it took to run a thousand miles, or if he used roads when he travelled long distance, Bolt remained stubbornly on the other side of the country.

Other aspects of being a hero settled into a relatively easy rhythm. There had been a small flurry of local media interest in the two heroes who had captured five career criminals so handily, enough that some people connected the dots to Lovett's subsequent, solo, lower-level do-gooding and christened his alter ego with its very own name. As with most of the media discourse these days, it started with a tweet. Lovett first saw it when Jon retweeted it: a tiny thumbnail that looked like a woman whose bag Lovett had retrieved from a purse snatcher the day before, a long enough thread of replies chiming in with their own stories of crimes averted that Lovett maybe teared up a little, and the name 'Quip'.

Quip? Really? He was usually too busy concentrating on not fucking things up to say anything particularly witty. Was the standard for hero banter that low? 'Short, effective and amusing' she'd said.

_It could be worse_, was Bolt's comment when Lovett sent him a screenshot.

_It's literally a joke about my height!_ Lovett replied, mostly for form’s sake. He was already looking for relevant, available twitter handles.

Less than a month later, @quipofla was twitter verified.

_QuipofLA? Was quip5893 taken?_ Bolt sent, without Lovett even having to boast about his blue tick.

_It's like quip of the day_  
_except I'm in LA_, Lovett explained.

_Is quip of the day a thing people say?_

_Shut up._ Lovett didn't want to turn that rock over, his brand was set, so he changed the subject. _You should get on Twitter, I'm telling you. People DM me so many tips I barely have to patrol anymore_.

_How modern of you_

_boltfromtheblue is taken, but I'm sure we can workshop something better_

_I'll let you know_, Bolt replied, which Lovett knew was his way of saying, _which one of us is the mentor here?_

Inflexible mentors/colleagues/friends with benefit (singular) aside, professionally, Lovett was thriving. He’d thrown enough random stuff at the wall that he had a couple of TV shows in development to talk about on dates and at parties, he had avoided serious injury for long enough that Jon had stopped scouring his body with wounded, worried eyes every time they hung out, and a surprisingly large number of people tuned in every week to listen to Lovett, Tommy and Jon having an only slightly toned-down version of the conversations about politics that they would have been having anyway. The election was a fucking shitstorm, but the other side was in sight, and based on all the indicators, the good guys should win a resounding victory.

Overall, life was good. Right up until the country collectively lost its mind and, overnight, life was terrible.

_Is assassination still a supervillain thing if the person really, really deserves it?_

_That's not funny,_ Bolt replied, almost immediately, _you're not gonna tweet that, are you?_

_It's a little funny._ Now that he’d been told not to, Lovett wanted to tweet it. If he did, Bolt might be annoyed enough to use an emoji. But on balance, he decided not to poke the oddly lax stance that the federal government had taken on superpowered civilians by even appearing to suggest that Quip would use his powers for evil. 

_Only if you mean it as a joke_.

Lovett rolled his eyes. _Relax, it's a joke_.

_Ha ha ha_.

Lovett could feel the sarcasm in every letter. That was the only kind of laughter that Bolt typed out. _I couldn't get away with it. You on the other hand..._

Bolt sent him a middle finger emoji. It was the best Lovett had felt in days.

Assassination was officially off the table, but Lovett knew that doing something was the only way to make this nightmare bearable. That was the advice he would have given someone else if they asked him how they could feel less helpless in a world that felt like it was slipping uncontrollably into a dystopian alternate universe where nothing made any sense. A sure way to have no influence on a situation was to do nothing but sit back and watch it unfold, and even a small action could return a sense of agency to you. It was what he'd learned from being in politics, from leaving politics, and from taking up vigilantism. But what more could he do, other than what he was doing, and short of murder? 

Lovett thought about it when he walked the streets the night after election night, spoiling for any petty showdown he could find like he hadn't since his first inept days in a makeshift mask. 

He thought about it when he, Jon and Tommy stumbled their way through apologies and recriminations and explanations in their first post-cataclysm podcast.

He thought about it as he sat in his non-functioning car, which Tommy and Jon were rolling down Sunset Boulevard, on their way to a meeting at The Ringer that they were definitely going to be late for. Should he run for office? His personal life was hardly in a fit state to stand up to any kind of background check, but there could be something local he could get involved in. Should he go and work for someone else running for office? Not only did he not want to, his recent level of insight into the political process indicated that he might not be that much of an asset.

The car jerked to a stop. Lovett stuck his head out the window. "It’s harder to get the momentum to start moving than to keep going," he informed Jon and Tommy, helpfully.

"You're really not going to push at all? Your car? That you forgot to put gas in?" Tommy asked, voice sharp. He was less sweaty than Jon, but he looked a lot more irritated.

"I'm far too small and helpless." Lovett was capable of pushing the car all by himself, that he was sure of. He was less sure if he was capable of pushing the car as hard as a normal person would when a normal person was right next to him. He batted his eyelashes at Tommy, mock seductive.

Tommy looked deeply skeptical. Sometime between them living together and the present day, he had grown immune to the charm of Lovett's semi-comedic tactical helplessness. 

Luckily, Jon was still on the hook. "Come on," he panted, bracing to push again like the good, true, gullible soul he was. "Revenge later. Pushing now."

Okay, maybe no one was on Lovett's hook. They all knew each other too well. That was what made them such a good team. More than the sum of their parts, you might say.

Slowly, the car started moving again.

"When you two are done back there, I've got half an idea," Lovett called.

* * *

_2017, Los Angeles_

With his new calling as a podcast mogul and internet celebrity, Lovett found he had a lot less time for vigilante work. He still followed up on tips he got through Twitter when it seemed like his kind of thing, but the comics were right. You really couldn’t hold down a steady job and roam the streets enforcing justice with your fists. Nowadays, people he employed and/or shared an office and carpool with both noticed and judged if he slept in till eleven, and black eyes looked terrible on livestreams.

Both things that Lovett did were important, but unusually, the less-violent activity was the one that felt more urgent, more like a chance to enact real structural change, and more like Lovett was uniquely suited to the task. Jon and Tommy were very insightful, but their metaphors were terrible. 

Once again, Lovett was profoundly grateful to have a person he could turn to for advice in this area. Bolt, he knew, would not hesitate to call him out if he was selling himself bullshit, puffed up enough to overestimate how vital he was to the Resistance.

After an unusually long delay, during which Lovett started to worry that Bolt was a Trump supporter, he weighed in. _Lots of things are important, and right now, Trump is pretty close to the top of that list. I think what you're doing with Crooked Media is great_.

_So I'm not wasting my fog-given talents in the selfish pursuit of fame and fortune?_ Lovett had been given ample reason to question his own judgment of late.

_I didn't know that there were fortunes to be found in podcasting_, which was a definite third-tier concern of Lovett's. Between the time that his unpaid work sucked up and the TV projects that mired deeper into development hell with every meeting that didn't happen, the amount of money he had bet on Crooked looked more reckless every day. Before Lovett could spiral off in a whole other direction, Bolt added, _No_.

_I don't need to have my own podcast as well though_. 

_You're allowed to have a fulfilling career_.  
_And you've officially used up your full year's quota of sincerity, so expect nothing but deflating put-downs for the next few months_.

That was both a joke and true, but Lovett risked one more needy question, the real one he was realizing at the heart of all of this. _What if someone gets hurt because I wasn't there?_

This time, the reply took so long to come that Lovett started to think Bolt had meant it about the sincerity quota. _That could happen anytime, no matter what you do_, he said eventually.

_Bleak_, Lovett replied. _Thank you_.

A few weeks later, as if to underline how helpless any individual was in the face of the lottery of bad shit that just happened, Jon almost got run over by a car. As if to underline how Lovett in particular couldn't guarantee the safety of even the most important people in his life, he was saved by LA’s other hero. And to make sure that Lovett never had a moment’s peace from this knowledge, some creeper had caught the whole thing on video and it was trending on Twitter. 

Lovett gritted his teeth as Tanya loaded the clip yet again, this time for Elijah's edification. Why did no one ever question why this guy had been filming in the first place? Even beautiful semi-famous idiots like Jon deserved to walk down the street in private. 

Across the room, Elijah tut-tutted. Lovett had watched the stupid thing enough times that he didn't need to look over to know which part they were at. Here was Jon, phone in one hand, both eyes fixed on it, navigating his way relatively competently to the crosswalk. Here was Jon flicking his eyes up for a second, failing to absorb that the red hand was _flashing_ goddammit, and stepping right off the sidewalk into the path of an oncoming truck. Lovett's stomach clenched in time with Elijah's gasp of horror. Every time, it _hurt_ to see how close Jon's frail, human body had come to getting pulverized by cold, unforgiving metal. Here, in Elijah's low whistle, was the moment that a mysterious figure, wrapped so thoroughly in deep black fabric that he looked like a void in the film, flickered into existence by Jon, whisked him back to the sidewalk faster than the camera could see, propped him against the wall, and winked out of sight again.

In the longer version of the clip, Jon leaned there for a good ten seconds, gaping like an idiot, while two cars ran over his phone. That was the only part of the video Lovett enjoyed, but the most popular version circulating online had cut it out, which was typical of Jon's undeserved good luck.

"You've got to get off Twitter," Elijah said to Jon as he entered the room, coffee in one hand and replacement iPhone in the other, like he'd learned absolutely fucking nothing. He claimed that he always put his phone in his pocket when he was walking outside now, but Lovett had his doubts.

"Oooh, did you see it?" Jon, somehow, fucking loved this clip of him nearly dying at the altar of social media's second worst creation. "Unbelievable right? You see this bit," he walked over to stand behind Tanya's desk with Elijah and made her replay it, "where he wraps his arms around me"—Lovett fumbled for something to play on his iPhone, he needed more than just the signal of wearing headphones to exempt him from this conversation—"the first time you see it it looks like he's teleporting, but we're actually moving really fast."

"Really?" Elijah rewound the clip yet again. "Oh yeah, I see it now." Lovett tried to catch Tommy's eyes—he'd displayed an unexpected but welcome disinterest in Jon's obsession and had been coaxed into a few eye rolls when the fanboying reached a real fever-pitch—but he was deeply absorbed in something on his computer.

"It was the strangest thing," Jon's tone was dreamy, like it always fucking was when he talked about his new superhero crush, which was constantly. "I could feel the wind rushing past, it was so thick it was like water and I couldn't breathe, but like. I could tell he was protecting me."

Ridiculous. Lovett had never been so embarrassed for someone in his life. Like pushing someone out of the way of a car was such a big fucking deal. Lovett could have done it if he'd been there. If he’d been there he wouldn't have let Jon walk into traffic like it was his first time in the big city, but if Jon had done it anyway, he could probably have stopped that truck with his fists. Maybe. Or just grabbed Jon by the collar and yanked him back like a normal person.

"They call him Shadow," Tanya added, redundantly. No one could be in this office for ten minutes without finding that out. Exhibit A: this whole scene. "He's been active in LA for about a month, but some people are saying he was in San Francisco way before that."

_Shadow_, Lovett typed to Bolt, his final hope of a receptive audience for his bitching-slash-sanity. He'd been annoyingly non-committal so far, but Lovett didn't have a lot of options. _What a stupid name. What is he, the canine star of a children's film? A horse who ultimately dies at the end of the book?_

_Didn't LAist name him?_ Well that wasn’t the point. That wasn’t the point at all. 

_Do you even care that he's kind of stealing your schtick?_ Lovett was not afraid to play dirty to get Bolt on side.

_I thought his powers were different._

_Based on Jon’s breathless witness accounts, that teleportation stuff is smoke and mirrors._ Lovett hoped that his sullen tone wasn't coming across in these messages.

_And I thought you were worried about cutting down on your superhero time and people getting hurt._ Lovett should have known better than to come to Bolt for anything but the kind of real talk he didn't want right now. _Aren't you at least happy he saved your friend?_

_Yes._ Lovett acknowledged begrudgingly. _I'm less grateful that Jon has imprinted on him like a baby bird._

_This is win-win. Jon didn’t get run over, and someone else is sharing the load of stemming petty crime in LA_.

Ugh. _Stop making sense even when I don't want you to._

For a while, Lovett and Shadow coexisted peacefully and separately, two ships in the night. When that ended, like so many things in Lovett’s life, it was down to pure dumb luck. 

_Are you going out tonight?_ As usual, Bolt’s concern gave Lovett a warm glow. Everyone else was obsessed with Shadow, but at least one person was checking in with him. 

_No I’m beat_, Lovett replied. It was Sunday night, and he was not-so-fresh off a weekend recording Lovett or Leave It in New York. Performing in front of that many people, in the kind of venues his younger self would never have thought he’d be able to fill, was incredible, a rush almost as good as saving a life, but it was also exhausting. And as Bolt pointed out, he was no longer the sole bulwark against street crime in LA. _Gonna watch some tv and go to bed before one am like a loser_.

_Good night loser_.

Television followed by bed, or at least couch, had absolutely been Lovett’s plan. But television had turned into television and Twitter because everyone’s brain was broken nowadays and one screen wasn’t enough. The smaller of Lovett’s screens told him that Jon’s last three tweets had been Shadow related. Did Jon have notifications on for Shadow? Shadow wasn't verified or on Twitter as far as anyone knew, but people hadn’t let that stop them. He had a hashtag. 

According to his hashtag, Shadow had nobly rescued a kitten from some guttering in West Hollywood this evening. It looked fucking adorable, a tiny white scrap of fur meowing silently in his giant, gloved hand. How his powers had helped him with that Lovett wasn’t sure. It seemed like a normal person with a ladder could have handled it just fine. 

One thing lead to another, and before Lovett knew it, he was in his mentions feeling insecure, which was always a recipe for disaster. 

‘Third time in a month someone has held up my local shop. They’re good people. Police can’t/won’t help. Will anyone? @quipofla #shadowboxing’ one of his mentions said. There was a photo of the shop, the distraught looking owner and her young son. Well shit. 

Since he didn’t even know if anything would go down tonight, Lovett scouted about for a good place to stake the shop out. Yes, he was sophisticated enough to do recon these days. You couldn't blindly march in somewhere because a rando on the internet said you should. It could be TMZ. He quickly spotted the perfect rooftop. The building had an external fire escape from the second floor to the roof and a good eyeline to the shop. 

It must have been the obvious move, because when Lovett got to the roof, there was already someone there. Sitting with his legs hanging over the edge of the roof, broad shoulders silhouetted against the ceaseless dull glow of LA's light polluted sky, was Shadow.

He didn’t appear to have realized that he was no longer alone. Lovett struck super senses off Shadow’s list of potential gifts. He was stealthy these days, but he wasn't that stealthy. 

If Lovett wanted, he could still walk away. Shadow would save the day if it needed saving, Jon would be happier than ever when he heard about it, and Lovett could hold on to his petty jealousy. Or, Lovett could be better than his baser instincts and not hold his insecurities against a fellow crusader for justice. It wasn't Shadow's fault that Lovett's best friend was a sucker for a mask and a muscular arm. _Share the load_, Bolt had said, and he hadn’t let Lovett down so far. It was worth a try. Maybe they could come up with a rota, make the arrangement more formal.

He sidled up to Shadow and tried to sound friendly. "Hi!"

Startled, Shadow nearly pitched off the roof. Lovett darted towards him and, somewhat redundantly because Shadow had managed to regain his balance by the time Lovett got there, grabbed his arm. "Don’t fall off,” he said, even more redundantly. But seriously, the last thing Lovett needed on his conscience was Shadow smearing himself on the sidewalk because Lovett had become too good at sneaking up on people.

"Er, hi," Shadow replied, in a familiar rumble. 

It was barely two syllables, two fake sounding, growled syllables, but that was all Lovett needed. He knew that voice. He released Shadow's arm, hand too numb to hold on, and stumbled back.

Cautiously, Shadow swung his legs over the edge of the roof and stood up. All six foot something of unfairly sculpted, tightly clad muscle stood before Lovett. The color of the costume was less flashy, the matte texture of the fabric was more modern, but he couldn’t hide it. That body was unmistakable.

"Bolt?" Lovett gasped. How could it be him?

"Um. No," he lied.

"You fucking liar." 

It was hard to absorb. Lovett knew, had told himself countless times, that any notion that he and Bolt were star-crossed almost-lovers kept apart by the swathe of USA between them was strictly his deluded fantasy, but he had thought they were friends. Friends with a lopsided understanding of each other's names and faces and lives—which once again, when made explicit, seemed like a warning sign—but Bolt had _said_ they were friends. He'd been answering Lovett's inane questions and receiving Lovett's closest secrets like he cared for _years_. 

Lovett had only been granted access to one carefully siloed part of Bolt’s life, but he’d thought that part—the part with powers and costumes and embarrassing stories that no one else could fully relate to—was one of the most valuable. Except, Bolt had been in town for months and hadn't said anything. He must have lied, multiple times, to pull that off. Somewhere, sometime, for some infraction, Lovett had had even his limited level of clearance revoked, and he hadn't even known it.

Lovett grabbed Bolt again, with both hands, in anger this time, and lifted him off the ground. He hung there, helpless. “Don’t,” Bolt whispered.

Don’t what? Fling him off the roof? Crush his stupid show-off shoulders with his hands? Did he think Lovett would do that? For a moment, Lovett almost thought he could. _Months_, Shadow had been LA and Bolt—stupidly, against all reason, the only person in the world that Lovett had trusted with all of himself—had been lying to him. They'd texted a few hours ago, for fuck’s sake. That was. Another realization hit Lovett, a sharp pain high in his chest.

That was probably the point. Whenever Bolt had casually asked him where he'd be patrolling, for safety, so there would be someone who knew where he was if something went wrong, that hadn't been out of concern. He didn’t care if something happened to Lovett. That had been a trick. A calculated technique developed to avoid him. Because that's how much he didn't want to see Lovett, didn't trust him. Enough to waste hours of his life accepting Lovett's prattlings and insecurities in exchange for a lower chance of ever seeing him again in the flesh.

As rejections went, it was profound and elaborate.

This was all too much, Lovett had to get out of there. He dropped Shadow, Bolt, whatever the fuck he was called, down onto the roof and turned to leave.

“I can explain.” He was still using his stupid goddamn fake voice. “Will you wait a moment?”

Lovett wouldn't, couldn’t. He’d never needed to storm out of a place and not be followed so fucking badly in his whole life. He grabbed the top of the fire escape and pulled until, with a horrible shriek, the metal tore away from the masonry. Lovett lifted the top section of the ladder, several feet of now twisted ironwork, and swung it up to fall between him and Bolt. Bolt jumped back.

“What’re you doing?” he asked, uncertain now.

Lovett climbed up onto the edge of the roof and turned back to make one thing crystal clear. “We have nothing to say to each other. Not ever again.” The closest building of vaguely comparable height was slightly taller and at least thirty feet away, a bigger jump than Lovett had ever attempted at this height. But Lovett had to get out of here. He gathered every ounce of unnatural strength in his legs and _jumped_, clearing the gap by the skin of his teeth. Let Bolt use his super-speed to race his way out of _that_. 

The door leading off the roof was locked, but it was easy for Lovett to snap the mechanism and make his escape. As the door fell shut behind him, Lovett thought he could hear Bolt shout one more time, in a voice that almost sounded normal—normal for an upset person who realized they probably had to spend at least a few hours trapped on a roof—but no matter. Letting that tiny bit of reality slip through was too little, too late. Lovett was already gone.

Quite how Lovett made it home in one piece, he wasn't sure. Out of sheer self-preservation, his brain had clicked him into autopilot, enough to keep him on the road and out of accidents, but not to absorb any mundane details like which route he'd taken or if he'd run any red lights.

With the desperation of a wounded animal seeking safety in its burrow, Lovett scrabbled to open his door. It was a double-edged sword though, the safety of home, and as soon as he got the door shut Lovett started to lose his grip on emotional distance. He leaned his head on the inside of his front door and tried, for a few more minutes, to keep it together.

The loss was too acute. It was stupid to mourn a fiction, but it fucking _felt_ like someone had died. Except the person he knew wasn't dead. They might never even have existed. Lovett couldn't take comfort in his memories of them. If he turned over any aspect of their relationship to consider what might be underneath, a sickly, squirming mass of questions swarmed out. Every bit of advice or comfort or affectionate teasing they'd ever exchanged had to be re-examined for motive and purity. When Bolt had told him to relax and let Shadow share the load, that had been to try and sideline him in his own damn city. When Bolt had told him he wasn't a horrible person if he stepped back from Quip, had that been true, or was he just doing more to keep Lovett as far away as possible?

It went even deeper than that. Bolt's inscrutable motives aside, what was wrong with Lovett? Not only that someone would reject him so thoroughly, but that he hadn't had a clue that anything was wrong. How fucking gullible _was_ he that despite their rocky start, and all the inequalities in their relationship, all the warning signs, he'd put so much trust into an empty shell? How many of Lovett's decisions had been influenced and guided by someone who didn't have his best interests at heart?

More pressingly, how many of his secrets could be used against him, now that the facade was broken? There was a reason that superheroes covered their faces, kept the details of their powers secret from the government and siloed the dangerous and occasionally less-than-legal work they did from their arrestable civilian identity. Now Lovett's continuing anonymity was contingent on Bolt's goodwill, and he had nothing that might offer him protection, no leverage or counter-blackmail material, because he'd been such a trusting fucking idiot, taken everything on someone else's terms.

Except, it was worse than that. Because if Bolt did decide to turn on him, it wasn't just Lovett's life that might come tumbling down. Other people's fortunes were tied to his: Tommy's, Jon's, their employees, and as pompous as it sounded, their audience. What would happen to Crooked's credibility if one of its founders was exposed as a masked vigilante? Their sponsors would run a mile. The whole business could go up in flames overnight. It was built on their reputation, their honesty. The careers of people who had trusted Lovett to help steer the ship would be ruined. Jon and Tommy could be ruined.

There was too much he'd done wrong, too much that could go wrong. Lovett couldn't breathe through it.

His spiral of despair was interrupted by a quiet knock. With numb fingers, Lovett opened the door. Whether it was Bolt with another foundation ripping revelation, or a reporter with leaked text messages, or the police with an arrest warrant, there was no point fighting it.

It was Jon, with a startled expression. Lovett's faith in himself had reached such a nadir that he took stock of their surroundings, genuinely unsure he hadn't wandered over to Jon's door in some kind of needy fugue, but no, he was still confining his emotional crises to the sanctity of his own home.

"Oh, you are up." Jon looked a little embarrassed and then, taking what a fucking mess Lovett was in, alarmed. "What's wrong?"

Briefly, Lovett made a last desperate pitch for dignity and silent, secret suffering that he never had to explain to anyone and opened his mouth to deny that anything was wrong. Like every pitch he'd made from elementary through to high school, it fell comically short of its mark. He couldn't get enough air to say anything, even if there had been anything to say. Too much was wrong. _He_ was wrong. About _everything_.

"Hey, whoa," Jon lurched closer to Lovett. His hands came up to almost make contact with Lovett's shoulders. Here he was, wanting to comfort Lovett, when Lovett's poor choices were a few steps away from destroying his life. Being kind to him, which was exactly the sort of thing that might shatter the scant, inadequate tatters of Lovett's composure and—yes, now he was crying. Fuck.

Hesitation gone, Jon wrapped him in a hug, which only made the whole crying situation worse. Before he knew it, Lovett had his face tucked into Jon's firm, warm chest and his arms wrapped around Jon's slim waist, taking in shuddery breaths of Jon's Old Spice bodywash and using the last vestiges of his control to make sure he didn't accidentally squeeze Jon's organs to pulp. Jon rocked him back and forth almost imperceptibly and made ridiculous soothing little noises in the back of his throat. 

Somehow, like almost everything Jon tried, it worked. The maelstrom began to calm.

"Is it—is your family okay? Are you okay?" Jon whispered, soft enough not to break whatever spell he'd cast. Lovett nodded into his shoulder, wondering, now that the worst of the storm had passed, how he'd explain this. A deceiver's work was never fucking done. 

The irony of Lovett bawling all over Jon because someone he trusted had systematically lied to him for years to the point of constructing a whole secret identity specifically to deceive him was not lost on Lovett. How would Jon feel, if he knew about all the lies Lovett had told him? Lovett tried to tell himself it was different, that he'd kept the part of him that was Quip separate from Jon, hadn't let everything get messily intertwined the way he had with Bolt. It didn't sound as convincing as it usually did.

He'd let this go on long enough. Lovett detached his hands from the back of Jon's worn cotton t-shirt, the one Jon slept in, he suddenly realized, and squirmed away. Jon let him go, but stayed close, a hand curled on Lovett's shoulder. His eyes were wide and worried, searching Lovett's face for clues as to what was wrong. Here was one of the people who actually cared, and Lovett did nothing but lie to him. No wonder nothing had ever happened between them. Lovett cut that thought off. He'd only just got the self-pity under control.

"It's nothing..." to worry about, died on Lovett's lips. It was something Jon would worry about, if he knew. "I can't really explain. But it's," not important? None of Jon's business? Lies, lies lies. “Me. I mean, my stuff. I fucked something up, was wrong about someone but. Everyone's okay."

What a piss-poor fucking mess of an explanation to offer him.

"Can I help?"

"You don't have to—" Lovett interrupted himself. "You've already helped." He fucking had, was the worst of it. And Lovett had nothing to give in return.

"Mysterious," Jon said, with a teasing lilt that let Lovett know he was going to get away with it, regardless of if he deserved to. "Don't tell me then." Jon was so loyal. So predictably good to the people he cared about.

Then, Jon did something Lovett would never have predicted. He lifted the hand on Lovett's shoulder, but not to withdraw it and re-establish their usual personal space. Instead, he touched his palm towards Lovett's face, so gently he could barely feel it, and thumbed a few lingering tears away. He didn't say anything.

Lovett became aware, in a whole new way, of how close they were. Of Jon's eyes on his face. Of the intimate picture they probably made. Of a spark of, or the potential for... something. If he stretched up a little, and Jon leaned down they could almost—It felt like Jon _wanted_ to—But that was crazy. That couldn't be. Thinking it might was exactly the kind of dumb shit that Lovett pulled. He’d only just realized the extent of the fallout from the last time he’d let a haze of high emotion carry his expectations and interpretations too far and corrupt a friendship. He’d barely had a chance to pull the faintest whisper of armor back over his tenderest vulnerabilities. And this relationship, him and Jon and the delicate balance that existed between all three sides of the Crooked founders' triangle, was too precious to risk. Lovett took a step back.

It almost looked like Jon might protest. Then Lovett took in the full picture of him properly for the first time. Not only was Jon wearing the shirt he usually slept in, he wasn't wearing shoes. Or pants. "What are you doing here?" Lovett wondered.

“Ah," Jon looked a little embarrassed. "It's uh. I woke up and, I don't know, you got back so late and I had a feeling that," Jon's voice wavered, uncertain, "something might be wrong.”

In all the many times that Lovett had driven back to his house at strange hours, Jon had never come knocking on his door to check on him, even when he'd thought Lovett might be out there developing a hard drug habit. It was difficult though, socially, to demand a more detailed explanation when Jon had just let him have an embarrassing, snotty breakdown all over his shoulder and barely asked why.

"It's late," Jon said, like he hadn’t chosen this odd hour to visit of his own free will, "and you're feeling better so. I'm going to go to bed." He exited the building and walked back to his house at a clip that could, by a more judgemental person, have been deemed hurrying.

Huh.

Come Monday morning at the office, everyone was a little fragile. Jon was so solicitous when Lovett arrived that no one, even Tommy, mentioned that it was almost eleven am. Though Tommy did give Lovett the kind of measured, mouth-only smile that made Lovett suspect Jon had briefed him that drama had happened and Tommy didn’t know how to handle it. 

In the cold light of day, Lovett could admit that last night he may have been catastrophizing ever so slightly. It didn’t hurt any less to find out that he’d been so completely wrong about Bolt, but writing off his entire life and the careers of half his friends as a result may have been a touch melodramatic. The Shadow debacle indicated a strong desire to keep Lovett as far away as humanly possible, but not an active intent to destroy him. He could have done that any time. If all Bolt had wanted was for Lovett to stay the fuck away, he’d achieved that. Last night might be an end to it all. 

The whole thing was still fucking weird though, so Lovett did something that, out of misplaced respect for Bolt’s privacy, he hadn’t done in a long time and googled him. 

Unfortunately, he ended up with more questions than ever. Lovett combed through local papers and the dregs of increasingly ancient social media for stories of super powered heroics in the Midwest, where Bolt had been the first time he’d researched him, but a lot of it was the same stuff he’d found ten years ago. A fast blue guy that hero enthusiasts sometimes identified as Bolt had popped up a few times since 2008—a house fire in Chicago, a spate of violent muggings in Cleveland—but it was sporadic. Lovett widened his search to teleportation, since a lot of people seemed to have misidentified Shadow’s power as that, but still found nothing. From what Lovett could piece together, after a few years of dwindling activity, Bolt hadn’t been active anywhere since at least 2014. Which was _before_ he’d arrived out of nowhere and guided Lovett through his first fumbling forays into using his powers. He’d been lying to Lovett for years. Since the moment that they'd reconnected.

Try as he might, Lovett could not make sense of it. What did it mean? The mystery of Bolt seeking him out made even less sense if he’d retired. Did he have a third hero identity Lovett hadn’t found? Was he tracking Lovett in particular, because of what happened in Indiana? What strange form of moral obligation would lead someone to put so much effort into making a connection, and then even more into keeping their distance? 

Still pondering, Lovett went to the kitchen to look for something with caffeine it. Or maybe alcohol. It had been that kind of a week. And it was only Monday. He paused outside when he heard Jon saying his name. 

“Do you know if Lovett has been seeing someone?” he was asking. Which was not the question that Lovett might have expected. 

“No,” Tommy sounded on-guard. “Why?”

“Just a theory. I saw him yesterday and, I don’t know, it seemed like he might have broken up with someone. He—"

“I wouldn’t know,” Tommy cut Jon off, so sharply that Lovett was taken aback. It was not the usual tone he took with Jon. Inside the kitchen, a chair scraped against the floor and Lovett hurried back to his desk. 

Although really, Lovett should have gone in there and set the record straight. The fact that Jon thought he’d been dumped was preposterous. This was totally different. If Lovett could explain what actually happened, that someone he respected and cared about and maybe lusted over sometimes had decided that they didn’t want to see him anymore and not even _told_... 

Fucking Jon and his effortless fucking insight. 

“Do you want to get a late lunch?” Tommy had managed to get right up behind Lovett’s desk without him hearing him, but years of honing his reflexes kept Lovett’s startle to a minimum. 

“Did Jon put you up to this?” Lovett asked, without turning around. He hated it when Jon and Tommy talked about him when he wasn’t there. He liked the idea that he was in their thoughts, but he didn’t want them comparing notes. 

“No. Why would Jon put me up to taking you out to lunch?”

Lovett turned to assess more accurately if this was true. His first thought was that Tommy’s nerve and his dissembling skills had faded, because he looked disproportionately perturbed by the accusation. Then Lovett took a closer look, and felt abruptly guilty. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Tommy looked like shit. He had the kind of puffy bags under his eyes that Lovett hadn’t seen since DC, and it was possible he hadn’t showered this morning. His golden wave of hair didn’t have nearly the obnoxious bounce to it that it usually did. Between that and snapping at Jon, he was clearly in a bad way. 

“Yeah, sounds good,” Lovett replied. Maybe Tommy had his own stuff he wanted to talk about. Or more likely, since Lovett’s advice giving skills weren’t fully appreciated in his own time, he thought Lovett might cheer him up. It was one of his specialties. Lovett went to minimize the 2008 Des Moines Register article he had open. It may be his company time to waste, but there was no need to advertise it. 

“Fuck, I can’t,” Tommy turned a shade or two paler, putting him firmly into the consumptive range of even the WASP complexion wheel. “I er, forgot I have a call. Now. In um, Lil’ Marco.”

“It was your idea, but okay,” Lovett called to his upright, rapidly retreating back. Maybe Lovett and Jon should be having a talk about him. 

For a couple of days, Lovett focused on his actual paid work and managed to limit obsessing over the myriad secret identities in his life to the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep. It was almost relaxing. It couldn’t last. 

On Wednesday afternoon, Lovett became aware that a small clump of Crooked employees had formed around Elijah’s desk, eyes collectively locked his monitor: the classic hallmarks of a new viral video sensation hitting the office. Hoping for an adorable animal video, but expecting some new Trump atrocity, Lovett went to mingle. 

At first, he was confused by the dark, poorly-lit image. It was obviously from a security camera, but it was nighttime, and the resolution was terrible. Then a black shape on screen uncurled into a familiar outline, and sick recognition rolled through Lovett’s body. It was the roof. Somehow, as surreal and inexplicable as a nightmare, one of his worst, most humiliating moments had leaped from his head to the outside world. How could he have missed the security camera?

On Elijah’s monitor, he saw himself grab Shadow and lift him off the ground. It should have been comical, the absurd sight of the smaller and significantly less stacked Quip lifting Shadow into the air, the height difference between them such that he couldn’t get more than an inch or two of clearance. But it was too intimate to be funny. One of Shadow’s legs jerked helplessly in the air, like it couldn’t compute that he wasn’t on the ground, but he didn’t struggle. He just let Quip dangle him there for long, silent seconds, anticipation building. 

Quip looked, fuck, scary. A reminder that with so much strength came a huge potential for brutality. Like he might have flung Shadow from that roof or torn his head off with his bare hands. When he finally let Shadow drop unharmed to the ground and strode off screen, it was almost anticlimactic, all that tension and threat dissipating uselessly. Lovett’s stomach turned queasily. There was no _context_ in this video. Had he really been— 

Lovett startled as the dark tangle of the twisted fire escape suddenly landed in the frame, silently scraping and shuddering over the concrete towards Shadow, forcing him to jump back. It looked, from this angle, like it had been some kind of attack. But that hadn’t been it! Lovett had just been trying to get away. He barely remembered throwing it. There was no sound, but you didn't need it to tell that Shadow was saying something and then, that he was shouting. The video cut out just as he seemed to give up, slumping back down on the edge of the roof. 

Absorbed by the video, Lovett had almost forgotten he was surrounded by several of his employees, suddenly party to a record of what he’d thought was a private experience. His eyes darted to each of their faces in turn, sure that one of them must have read the truth of who he was in his reaction, but they were all focused on the video.

“What the fuck?” Tanya summed it up succinctly. “Is that whatshisname, Quip? I thought they were both good guys.”

“Good guys with beef, apparently,” Elijah replied. 

“I don’t know,” the new intern piped in, “Shadow was just standing there. The short one was the one getting aggressive.” 

Vaguely, Lovett recalled that she’d once worn a bootleg Shadow t-shirt to work. He’d teased Jon a little too pointedly about getting him one until Jon had turned pink and Tommy had snapped at him, and then Lovett had felt jealous and regretful all afternoon. 

“Yeah, but you couldn’t hear what they were saying.” Priyanka, who hadn’t even been watching the video, rolled her chair over. “That was clearly like, a thing with a backstory.”

“It’s probably some stupid dick-measuring contest over who LA’s official hero is,” Tanya said, dismissively. 

“Yeah, but Shadow’s powers are way cooler,” Priyanka insisted, “he could have got away, but he didn’t. He let Quip pick him up.”

“How many times have you watched this?” Elijah asked. 

“Too many,” Priyanka acknowledged, “the sexual tension is intoxicating.” Lovett struggled to keep his face vaguely impassive. Was he truly that obvious? No wonder Bolt wanted to avoid him. 

“That looked more like Shadow was being threatened,” the intern interjected. “We don’t know what powers that other one has or what he’d do. Maybe he’s kidnapped Shadow’s girlfriend or something, and he can’t fight back.” It was probably good for her that Lovett had temporarily forgotten her name, because he had started to take against her. 

“Hey Jon!” Elijah called. Lovett looked up to see both his co-founders returning from a dog walk. “You gotta see this, there’s another Shadow video.”

Jon perked right up, eager as ever for more Shadow-related gossip. Lovett practically ran back to the safety of their office. The only thing worse than watching it for the first time himself would be seeing Jon’s reaction. He knew, with a stomach-turning certainty, whose side Jon would be on.

Barely a minute after Lovett had sat down, Tommy strode in to their office, face taut and pale, and sat at his desk without saying a word. For once, Lovett wasn’t irritated to be overlooked or distracted by what might be going on with Tommy. He was simply grateful to be ignored. He’d keep his head down, both metaphorically as Quip and literally during office discussion, and soon enough, this would all blow over. 

It took for-fucking-ever to blow over. Typically, mainstream media interest in heroes was limited. Outside of movies, epic world-endangering conflict was rare, even for powered individuals, and they’d been around long enough for street-level activity to become almost normal. Since quotidian crime-fighting didn’t sell especially well, it often didn't even get written up, especially in a big city. Two good guys in what seemed to be a pretty personal fight though? That was new. That suggested the kind of rivalry that generated thousands of clicks and hours of panel discussions between body language experts and legal experts and enraged anti-vigilante activists. Lovett gained a whole new appreciation for the term "fake news" because fully 70 percent of the stories featured places he’d never been and things he’d never said and events that had never happened. Didn’t people fact check these random tweets they built their articles and blog posts around?

For multiple news cycles, what felt like half of LA debated endlessly over whether this was going to spiral into greater conflict with repercussions for the city, or if one of LA’s heroes was going to turn into a villain, or, niche but most excruciatingly of all, if Shadow and Bolt were fucking. Priyanka was not, it seemed, alone in reading sexual tension into the video. The Cut posted an article about violence, masculinity, and the repression of queer narratives in mainstream culture that Lovett would have loved if it had been constructed around literally anything other than his personal, private queer narrative. 

In some ways, Lovett got it. Everyone was desperate to talk about something that wasn’t about the degradation of their democracy. Something low-to-medium stakes and lightly salacious. He just really wished that something other than one of the most profound rejections he had experienced since high school had captured the internet’s imagination this month. 

It was somehow even worse that lots of people—largely the ones who didn't think he had turned evil! His allies!— seemed to read the kind of mutual strength of feeling into it that Lovett now knew didn’t exist, had probably never existed. Part of him wanted to take it as proof that his assumptions had been reasonable, but the rest of him feared it was more like proof of how humiliatingly obvious he’d been. So obvious that strangers watching a silent, badly framed CCTV clip could read the non-platonic nature of his feelings in the back of his fucking head. 

For the first week or so, it was so bad that Lovett could barely leave his desk. He scurried through the breakroom and other shared areas, cold analyses of the breakdown of his friendship and the likelihood of him using his powers to kick his way into a bank vault swirling around him, biting back retorts of ‘I would never’ and ‘but _he_ was the one who’. 

Lovett hoped that, wherever he was, Bolt worked from home or an isolated corner office or had no friends. He couldn't bear to think of him surrounded by similar water cooler chat. If he was, maybe every word of overheard speculation enraged him, Lovett's feelings leaking all over him and making him messy by association. Or worse, maybe it made him glad that he’d kept his distance and his privacy, made him thankful for the lucky escape he’d had from Lovett’s desperate, unreciprocated attachment. 

Online wasn't quite as bad, at least he could just not click on stuff, except that he was one retweet away from muting Jon. Predictably, Jon was Shadow's staunchest defender. However much anyone—not, through great force of will, Lovett—pointed out that Quip had been around for years, helped lots of people, Jon was so sure Shadow was right that by inference it followed that Quip had to be wrong. Like Lovett wouldn't have saved him from that stupid car if he could! 

“If you think about it, it would be so easy to start feeling like you were better than normal people, if you were walking around with the power to crush them at any time,” Jon mused, about a week and a half into his campaign to persuade himself and half the office that Quip was on the way to trying to build his evil lair in the Hollywood sign or whatever. “Can you even relate to people, when you’re that different from them?”

Unusually for Jon, he didn’t even seem to register that Tommy, who had been working on the interview questions for his next episode of Pod Save The World more feverishly than Lovett had seen him work on anything since the stakes stopped being national security and actual war, was clearly not engaging with him. In theory, Tommy was taking notes from some book relevant to his next episode. In practice, he hadn’t turned a page or touched his keyboard since Jon started today’s update on Quip’s moral degradation. When he was in good condition, Tommy’s concentration was legendary, but he could get knocked off kilter. Lovett wondered if his insomnia was surging again. 

“At the very least, it probably makes him an entitled ass,” Jon continued. Lovett gritted his teeth. Someone was being an ass, but for once, it wasn’t him. 

“They both have powers,” Tommy interjected, unexpectedly. 

“Well, yeah—”

“Do you think all powered people consider themselves above humanity, or just this one?" It was maybe the closest Lovett had ever heard Tommy come to expressing even a mild feeling about heroes. 

Understandably, Jon looked confused. He was on the backfoot for disparaging heroes, and Tommy was snapping at him? It was the world turned upside down. “I—” he started. 

“I’ll be in Lil’ Marco,” Tommy said, cutting him off. He snapped his book and his laptop closed in quick succession, “some of us have work to do.”

“Tommy doesn’t care about this dumb story,” Lovett hissed at Jon, once the tense, brooding shoulders in question were out of earshot.

“Yeah, I know, you’re both too cool to care about superheroes.” Jon looked a little hurt still. Storming out was more of a Lovett move. From Tommy, it seemed extremely pointed.

“I'm sure it's a proxy irritation for some graver woe, but maybe cool it with the disruptive Quip chat for now," Lovett advised, only semi-selfishly, “four-hour Tommy is in the house, and he’s not into it.”

Jon cooled it, making their office one of the few oases of sanity at Crooked, but the rest of the world staggered on with it for several more days. By the skin of his teeth, Lovett kept the incident off the rant wheel, despite two guests making the suggestion and Jon offering to come do a surprise appearance. Apparently he had a lot of pent-up hot takes. 

“Aren’t you always saying it’s time for a gay superhero?” Travis asked, shit-stirring as usual.

It was a deeply irritating point. Lovett had kept Quip’s sexual orientation ambiguous out of paranoia that a short, gay hero in LA with a reputation for one-liners might get linked back to him, but he wasn’t happy about it. And he and Bolt had hooked up, so he had to assume Bolt was at least bi. 

“Maybe I’ll put ‘toxic heterosexual masculinity’ on there and talk about how one guy can’t hold another guy up in the air without people thinking that something is going on between them,” he said instead, which didn’t even make sense. 

Lovett was pretty sure Travis planned to slip an unauthorized reference onto the wheel anyway, but before he could Tommy snapped and banned talk of heroes entirely. Even Travis respected the icy blue authority of Tommy’s implacable glare. Jon thought the edict was ridiculous (“our office culture is non-hierarchical and current affairs engaged!”) but he and Lovett were both trying to be on their best behavior for Tommy, so he didn’t fight too hard. 

Grateful for the favor that Tommy had unknowingly done for him, Lovett redoubled his efforts to find out what was wrong, but his tactic of affectionate teasing and invitations out only seemed to make Tommy sadder.

Shit was fucked. 

For the most part, Lovett laid Quip low while he was intermittently trending on Twitter, waiting for fresh news fodder. When a team of high ranking banking executives successfully pulled off a series of high-value heists on their employers and then committed mass suicide it was, not that Lovett liked to glory in death and destruction, a boon. No one could explain it, but everyone wanted to try. The spotlight and the think pieces moved on, and just in time, because Lovett was restless and itching to get out there. He’d recieved a DM about a group of men that were convening reguarly to hassle women leaving a lesbian bar, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to ease back in by giving some bullies the scare of their life. 

Lovett checked it out first; he wasn’t stupid. Spying from another rooftop seemed like tempting fate, but there was a shadowy doorway across the street that he could linger in. As reported, there was a cluster of six men down the street from the bar, so that patrons coming from that direction had to walk through a gauntlet of jeers and catcalls. 

The bouncers from the bar weren’t interfering, even though this had to be bad for their business. That was the first strange thing. Secondly, the catcallers weren’t what Lovett had anticipated. Not to stereotype, but Lovett had been expecting boorish middle-aged incels. Most of these guys didn’t even look like they’d know each other in real life. 

There were three young men with improbable mustaches who did seem to have come directly from the same barista conference, but there was also a man Lovett's age in an open plaid shirt with two years ago’s hipster beard who was clearly not cool enough to hang with the first three, an older guy in a business suit, and a skater-looking kid who could not have been a day over seventeen. They looked more like a modern twist on the Village People or a random coffee shop’s worth of strangers than people who would get together for the evening to shout homophobic slurs. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that they could have met online, for good or ill the Internet had the power to bring diverse groups of people together, but the whole thing smelled off. The plaid guy, Lovett noted with a knot in his stomach, was wearing a ‘Friend of the Pod’ t-shirt underneath his open button-down. It seemed like a trap. 

A trap though, that had been sprung with real bait. Lovett watched as a couple crossed the street twice in one block to detour around the group, shoulders pressed close together for safety. Fuck it. Maybe this was a setup, maybe some dickhead was in another doorway hoping to get footage of him beating callow young men up indiscriminately, but Lovett couldn’t walk away. If they thought that was his style, he’d show them that it wasn’t. Another woman, eyes fixed so intently on her phone that she probably hadn’t spotted the cluster of men, was about to walk into them, and Lovett couldn’t listen to another round of their shit. 

Mask secured, Lovett crossed the street. It immediately got much weirder. As soon as they caught sight of Lovett, they abandoned the woman and swarmed around him. Their body language was aggressive, but their faces were strangely blank. One of them threw a punch that Lovett dodged easily and then fell over, like he was trying to run away from his own arm. The one in the ‘Friend of the Pod’ shirt took a run at him. Lovett side-stepped and scooped him into a loose restraining hold. Some of the remaining group started tugging on his arms, but it felt halfhearted. He shifted his captive to one arm and batted the others away as best he could with the other arm. At least one person was pounding their fists on his back, but with all the strength of an exhausted toddler, irritating and easy to ignore.

“What are you doing?” he asked the so-called Friend of the Pod. It came out, appropriately, more baffled than outraged. 

Deepening the mystery yet further, the guy burst into tears. “I don’t know!” he wailed. “I don’t even know these people! I just keep coming here!”

The skater kid, who had been literally hanging off Lovett’s shoulder like a limpet, put his weight back on his feet and let go. “What are you doing?” he repeated under his breath, mouthing the words as if he’d never heard them before. 

“My girlfriend's bi. I don’t even think these things,” the one in a headlock sobbed. Lovett let him go, and they all scattered like a spell had broken. 

What. The. Fuck. 

When his phone vibrated with a message from Bolt, it felt like the next logical step. _I know you don’t want to hear from me, but we need to meet,_ the message said. _For professional reasons. Something strange is going on._

This at least, was true. Lovett contemplated and quickly discarded the possibility that Bolt was behind whatever the fuck that had been. Even after everything, Lovett trusted that Bolt wanted to help people. He should say yes. 

“Take a running jump into that wall,” someone behind him said. 

Lovett turned around. A bland-faced middle-aged man was standing behind him, so close that he probably should have heard him coming. He seemed unperturbed by the fact that Lovett was wearing a mask. “What?”

“You heard me.” He smiled. “Put your head down, and run as hard as you can at that wall. Let’s see who’s tougher.”

His voice was confident, resonant, but Lovett felt no urge to follow his command. He was starting to think that might be unusual though. “I'm not going to do that,” he said slowly. “Did you ask those guys to come here?”

“Damn. Worth a try.” The man’s hand darted out to grab Lovett’s arm, and the moment it made contact, Lovett’s entire body seized up. He was helpless, immobile as the man reached his other hand up to Lovett’s head. “There’ll be someone susceptible in your life.”

Now both hands were on Lovett’s head, and the whole world fell away. It was like he’d plucked out Lovett’s brain and deftly turned it inside out. He couldn’t see the man or the street he’d been standing in, he couldn’t feel his body, but his thoughts were all around him, crystal clear. 

“Who’s most important?” the voice asked, and this time it rang through Lovett’s whole being like a command. He couldn’t stop it, there they were with him, Jon and Tommy. More than just their image, the whole concept of them landed fully formed into his mind, their faces, their laughter, the sense of their broad shoulders and support and the way they bounced off each other. Their names, their addresses, the drinks they ordered in company and the drinks they ordered when it was just them. The innumerable layers of every affectionate, cutting, humdrum, lustful, irritated thought Lovett had ever had about them. 

And it didn’t _stop_. Bolt was behind them, intoxicating power and stinging rejection and pale pink lips, and he could sense people were crowding in fast to take their turns: his mom, his sister, Pundit, Spencer, Tanya, everyone he cared about lining up to add themselves to a list that could only mean their destruction. 

He had to stop this, had to get away. It only felt, he hoped, like his body was gone. If he could just— 

With an abrupt snap, the voice ripped away and Lovett landed back in his body and back in the street. The man was tumbling down to the ground as if someone had pushed him. Lovett blessed whatever deeply-embedded playground reflex enabled that feat, and ran. 

The details of what had happened were not at all clear to him, but the underlying threat was obvious. Lovett dared a look over his shoulder. No one seemed to be following him. He slowed enough to unlock his phone and call Bolt.

“Yeah?” Bolt answered, cautiously. 

Lovett launched right in. There was no time for niceties. “You’re in danger,” he panted, gasping the words out between gulps of air. Where the fuck had he parked? “There’s this man. He can read minds. I think he can control people.” 

Finally, Lovett got back to his car and fumbled his way in. 

“That makes sense. The craziest thing just ha—" There was a fascinating story there, Lovett was sure, but there was no _time_. 

“He saw you in my mind, and he might be coming after you. I don't think I know anything that would lead him to you but he also saw my—saw Jon and Tommy, and where they live, and he’s definitely going to go after them.” Lovett’s half thought out plan suddenly caught up with itself, its greatest point of vulnerability crystallizing in Lovett’s mind. “I need your help.” If Bolt wouldn’t help him or see him, really truly wanted nothing to do with him, Lovett would have to choose where he went first. How would he even do that?

“Of course.” Bolt said, swift and certain. Lovett pushed down a surge of grateful tears. Bolt wanted to help people. That didn’t make Lovett special. 

“Can you go get one of them? They don’t know about any of this, and I can’t go to both places at once, but I think he wants to. I don’t know, use someone I care about as leverage or something, because he couldn’t make me follow his orders. Where are you—" That was a sensitive question. “If I tell you where they are, can you go to the closest and—"

“Meet me at Jon’s,” Bolt said. “I’ll um. Bring Tommy.” Lovett didn’t bother to ask how he knew where both his best friends lived. How did Bolt ever know anything?

Only the knowledge that they might need Jon’s front door later stopped Lovett from crushing it into matchsticks with his fists. He had a key, but his hands were shaking too much to get it in the lock, which was unreasonably tiny. There was probably no way to get out of this without blowing up between one and three thirds of his life, but his priority for now had to be making sure that between zero and zero of the people he loved most died or got mind controlled by some Killgrave wannabe. Everything else had to take a backseat, whatever revelations that would mean.

Before his resolve to respect the integrity of the door was about to crumble, Jon flung it open. He looked Lovett up and down, face like thunder, spat out, “Great, another one,” and marched back into his house. 

If he was this annoyed before Lovett had even explained, it didn’t exactly bode well for the rest of this conversation. He put the chain on Jon’s door, because every little bit helped, and followed him into the living room, where Bolt-as-Shadow was sitting awkwardly on the couch. 

“Are either one you going to explain this?” Jon asked. 

Fuck, they were going right in then. If he was going to do this, Lovett needed to do it fast. Like ripping a band-aid off. 

“I'm Quip,” he started. It was strange to say. He’d never done it out loud before. He’d barely even thought it. 

“Of fucking course,” Jon said, rolling his eyes. 

Which wasn’t exactly the reaction that Lovett had expected. He forged on. 

“And there's this psychic asshole who has it out for me for some reason—I don’t even know who he is!—and he said he was going to—" Lovett’s faltered. This, more than anything, touched on the softest part of his underbelly, but he forced it out. “—to hurt the people that I. That are most important to me, and then he read my mind and”—I couldn’t keep you safe from him—“and you were all in there,” Lovett’s breath was coming fast, the cornered pants of a vulnerable animal. He’d said too much. He had to keep going, “so now you're here so that um, Shadow and I can, you know, keep you safe.” 

Except, Lovett realized as he looked around, they weren’t all there. It had been a strategic error to launch in to the meat of the situation while Tommy was in the toilet or whatever. Now he might have to repeat some of it, and that made it more likely people would hear it. 

“Where’s Tommy?” he asked Bolt.

Bolt didn’t say anything. 

“Didn’t you. You did bring him, right?” No no no. If Tommy wasn’t here, then it could already be too late. Anything could be happening to him. Had Lovett made a horrible mistake, trusting any part of his most important people to Bolt? “Did he already have him?”

“You really don’t know?” Jon asked. For the first time, he looked something other than supremely pissed off. 

“Know what?”

“That’s Tommy.” Jon was pointing, inexplicably, at Bolt. 

“No.” That couldn’t be true. 

Instead of dispelling this bizarre accusation, Bolt reached up and started to pull his mask off. Even as he did it, part of Lovett was sure that it was merely the most succinct way to counter what Jon had said. Except that, when the mask slid from his face, like the villain at the end of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, it was the last person that Lovett expected. It was Tommy. 

The shock was too big for betrayal. Lovett was still rewriting the last four years of his life based on the Shadow revelation, he didn’t have the _capacity_ to go back this far. It had been Tommy in the elevator and Bolt in the White House. Bolt that he’d _lived_ with and mooned over and got drunk with countless times and gone on holiday with and founded a business with. Bolt wasn’t distant, half a country away, he was literally close enough that most days Lovett could have reached over and put a hand on his face. It had been Tommy who he’d turned to for sage superhero advice and foiled a heist with. _Tommy_ that he’d—

“We had sex?” Lovett blurted out. He knew, even as he said it, that it was probably not a helpful question, but how could he keep it in? He’d been struggling and failing to keep Tommy in a purely platonic box for a decade, and he’d missed it when the earth-shaking event happened for real? It was so unjust. 

“_That’s_ your headline concern?” Tommy groaned. Lovett tried not to let the reaffirmation that it had barely registered with him sting. 

“You two had sex?” Jon at least, looked appropriately floored. “And you didn’t know it was Tommy?”

“He kept his mask on,” Lovett explained, though if anything, that made it sound worse, “and I couldn't exactly find out afterward, because he immediately destroyed that whole identity.” Which didn’t help either. His romantic life had been fucked up for a while, even more than he’d known.

“That’s not fair,” Tommy started to say, but he was cut off by Jon, with, to be fair, a much more devastating retort. 

“You got intimate and then he freaked out and avoided you? Yeah, I’ve been there.”

Did Jon mean? He couldn’t mean. Lovett’s brain skittered away from the thought, gun shy. 

“I didn't freak out!” Tommy sputtered. He was outraged, but not in a way that refuted a romantic connection. More like the kind of outrage that only an ex could evoke. “You ended it! You said that it wasn’t a good idea and the next day we were back to being best friends only.”

“Because the moment it seemed like more than just hooking up, you pulled away.” 

_More_ than just hooking up? But. They were both straight. In Tommy’s case, maybe _mostly_ straight, but that was the starting point for… everything. 

“What?” Tommy looked almost as baffled as Lovett felt, and he felt like a sponge that was already too saturated to absorb anything else, shock and incomprehension running off him like water. 

“You got the flu, remember?” Jon asked, taking a sharp turn out of anger into vulnerability. “And I stayed and looked after you and we— but overnight you were suddenly too busy to see me. You missed work. You got into like, three bar fights in a week trying to, I don't know, reassert your masculinity or whatever. You stopped talking to me.”

“That's not.” Tommy shook his head, hesitated. “I didn't have the flu.” He fell silent. 

“I don’t understand,” Jon replied, which made two of them. 

“We had that science and innovation event in that lab, and I got bitten—"

“By those fleas?”

“—by genetically altered _mites_,” Tommy said, in the long-suffering tones of someone who had had to correct this several times. “Paratarsotomus macro-, never mind. It's the fastest animal in the world in terms of its size. And then, well then this happened,” he gestured at his skintight catsuit, “and it took me a while to figure out how to balance stuff. But it was never about _you_.”

“Oh.” Jon’s voice was small. 

They stared at each other for a few long beats, but whatever was going to happen next was disrupted by the back door bursting open. Lovett tore his attention away from the love story he’d been best friends with for over ten fucking years without realizing to discover that they’d wasted all their fleeing time on interpersonal drama.

Outside, a burly-looking fireman with a battering ram joined the wall of blank-faced civilians that surrounded Jon’s house. Inside, Lovett’s brand-new nemesis was joining them.

“You left rather abruptly,” he said to Lovett. 

“Why are you doing this?” Lovett edged in front of Jon, the most vulnerable of them. “Who the fuck are you?”

“You don’t remember me?” he shook his head. “How typical. You destroyed a plan that was years in the making, ruined my life, and you don’t even care. You can call me The Voice.”

Like fuck Lovett was going to call anyone such a dumb fucking name. Didn’t he know that was already a mediocre TV show? “Ruined your life?” A little tickle of recognition started in the back of his mind. There was something familiar about him. _Destroyed a plan that was years in the making_. The moment the thought occurred to him, Lovett knew it was right. It was the delivery guy from the elevator! And he had the nerve to stand there like he was the victim. “You nearly killed me! You were trying to kill even more people!”

“They wouldn’t all have died,” he said, dismissively, “I was trying to show them how powerful my work was and get my lab back. If you hadn’t fucked it up, humanity could have evolved. But maybe it’s for the best. I was naive back then. I wanted to make everyone better.”

“And now, you’re the only one who’s better?” Lovett hazarded. If he’d had this power in Indiana, he hadn’t used it, but he had been indiscriminately splashing about dangerous, power-granting chemicals. It made sense that he would have eventually used them on himself. 

“Now you’re getting it! Most of humanity are puppets, and now I can operate them.” He gestured to the ring of people outside and in unison, they all took a step towards the house. It was, Lovett had to concede, extremely creepy and dramatic. 

“I know who you are,” Tommy interjected. “You ran the lab where I got bitten.”

“Ah.” The man that Lovett would not call The Voice, it was truly too stupid, turned his attention to Tommy. “I thought you might be another one of my creations. My work was at an early stage then, potent, but unpredictable. I was still using animal DNA to guide the mutations.”

“Is that why most of your subjects died?” Tommy asked. Lovett was going to have to get him to explain a lot of this backstory if they survived. He was clearly the only one who halfway knew what was going on. 

“No, that still happens,” he said, casual, “but you could have ended up with compound eyes or a carapace.” Something seemed to occur to him. “Are you the one who sent the records to the Department of Defense?”

Tommy shrugged. Lovett repressed an inappropriate smile. Of course Tommy had fucked up this guy’s nefarious plans through the proper channels in the midst of a life-changing personal transformation. Of course. 

The, ugh, Voice was obviously trying to retain a veneer of calm, like he was over it. Just as obviously, he was not. “It’s good that you’re here then. Maybe I should even thank you. Losing that contract was a vital step on the path to my true destiny.” His voice took on a strange resonance as he said to Tommy, “Why don’t you come over here, next to me.”

Tommy shook his head. 

“Never mind.” His smile had turned tight and unconvincing. “You’ll still pay.”

“What do you want?” Lovett asked.

“What do I want?” His eyes blazed, almost, Lovett was sure, literally. Deep within them, there was a small green pinprick of light, like a fully charged electronic device. “You,” he spat, “I gave you these powers. Both of you! You should be working for _me_, doing _my_ bidding. Not wasting time on petty criminals.”

“Except, your powers don’t work on us,” Lovett said, slowly, like he was explaining to a child. 

“Because they’re my powers! Like recognizes like!”

“Sure,” Tommy agreed. “They still don’t work.”

“I don’t need them to work. I just need leverage. And lucky me, you two happen to be in love with the same person. It’s buy one, get one free! Come here, Jon.” With a furious jerk of his arm, he beckoned Jon over like he was a recalcitrant child. 

Lovett braced himself to restrain Jon, to stop him leaving or hurting himself, at whatever cost. It wasn’t a long term solution, but the others had snapped out of it. There were limits to his power. 

But Jon didn’t move. “Er, no.” 

“What?” Now, The Voice—which Lovett would think in his head but not say out loud, that was his limit—was truly losing it. “I said come here!”

“Am I supposed to feel something?” Jon asked Lovett, with a perfectly calculated look of faux innocence. 

The Voice, whose nom de plume seemed more and more appropriate as his credibility declined, honest-to-God stamped his foot. “How the fuck are you all immune?” he screamed, “Why does this keep happening?” 

Not expecting it to be this easy, Lovett took advantage of his distraction to step forward and bonk him none-too-gently on the head. It was more an art than a science, hitting someone with the right amount of force to knock them unconscious but not kill them, but Lovett had been practicing. “The Voice” went down like a sack of bricks. 

“Huh.” Tommy blinked down at the heap of villain on the floor. “That was anticlimactic.”

“Have you got any zip ties?” Lovett patted his pockets down. “I’m all out.”

“Yeah,” Tommy pulled one out—the zipped pocket was at the small of his back in this costume—knelt and snapped them on. “Duct tape?” Jon pulled a roll out of a drawer and Tommy smoothed a strip firmly over their fallen enemy’s slack mouth. 

“What do we do about them?” Jon nodded out the window, where a ring of people still surrounded his house. 

“I asked the ones who were after me what they were doing, and they seemed to shake it off,” Lovett replied, “but they’d been under a few days.”

Jon leaned out the back door. “Er, you can go now,” he called, awkwardly. 

Incredibly, it worked. One by one, the people outside seemed to stir and come back to themselves. Judging by the haste with which they began to disperse, they no longer wanted to be there. 

“What about him?” Jon nudged the unconscious man with his toe. 

“I’ve got a contact,” Tommy said. Of course he did. 

It might have been a bit of a letdown in terms of climactic Big Bad battles, but the showdown did seem to have dissipated any residual anger in the room. This was good, because until Tommy’s mysterious contact came through, they were all stuck there. In place of the anger though, was awkwardness, a sensation that Lovett did not enjoy feeling with two of his favorite people. They propped their vanquished foe up in the corner where they could all see him and sat on different pieces of furniture, not making eye contact with one another.

“I wonder why his power didn’t work on Jon,” Lovett mused, mostly to break the tension, but also because there were several loose ends remaining. 

“There’s a lot I don’t understand,” Jon said, “but if this is about that bomb Lovett kicked, I did get some of the green stuff on me.”

“What?” Tommy’s eyes widened in horror. “But you said you were fine!”

“I _was_ fine!” Jon crossed his arms defensively. “It was only a little. And ‘Bolt’”—as ever, Jon’s quote fingers were hilariously inept—“or whatever, was kind of an asshole about it, so.”

Tommy groaned and flopped back on the couch, hands over his face. “Worst. Rescue. Ever,” he mumbled between his fingers. 

“Do you also have powers?” At this point, Lovett didn’t think anything would surprise him. 

“No,” Jon scoffed. “I mean, not really.” His eyes darted between Lovett and Tommy, shifty, “I don’t think.”

Pointedly, Lovett waited for him to elaborate. 

“It’s just that, I did sort of suddenly get a lot better at speech writing after that.”

“That’s not a superpower, that’s a humblebrag.” 

“No, I mean. A lot better. Sometimes it was like Obama’s thoughts arrived in my head, fully formed.”

“You can read minds?” Lovett stood up, aghast. 

“Obviously not,” Jon said, indicating the general chaos around them. Lovett sat back down. 

“So you can only read Obama’s mind? I can’t believe you never mentioned—” Lovett stopped himself mid-beratement when Jon glared at him. Yeah, best not get into who did and didn’t mention things at what time. 

“I didn’t even realize I was doing it,” Jon insisted.

“It didn’t seem weird to you, that _the President’s thoughts_ would just pop into your head?” The national security implications alone boggled the mind. 

“I thought I was growing into my craft! You know, like I finally put in my ten thousand hours and levelled up.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tommy grunted from the couch. 

“It only happens sometimes,” Jon protested, “and it’s not like I can control it!”

“Does it still happen?” Lovett asked. 

“Not with Obama. Not like that. But that night you were upset, I woke up, and I _knew_ something was wrong. That’s why I came over.” Jon hesitated, looked up at Lovett and Tommy and dropped his eyes to the carpet. “And for years, I’ve had dreams about the two of you in danger, fighting. I thought they were just dreams.” He took a breath, released it. “It’s only with, you know, some people. That I’m connected to. That I care about.”

This seemed to Lovett like the perfect opportunity to tease Jon about his crush on Obama, but Tommy, the contrary bastard, had to make it serious. He sat up, so he could make proper eye contact with Jon. “I never wanted to end things between us,” he said. Right, that loose end. Heaven forbid that they wait till Lovett wasn’t here to work their ill-fated romance out. “But um. You’re right, I did withdraw. I hated lying to you, so instead, I didn’t say anything.”

He hadn’t minded lying to Lovett, a mean, petty little voice in his head whispered. He’d gone out of his way to lie to him. Lovett pushed that thought down. It was different, apparently, with them. Tommy loved Jon, a supervillain could pluck that from his mind in a few minutes. And if the big, wet windows to Jon’s soul were anything to go by, it was mutual. 

Not that Lovett could blame either of them. Of anyone in the world, he got it. He pulled his shoulders in and tried to make himself as small as possible, inconspicuous. 

“I was. I was maybe also a little scared. Too scared to talk to you about it.” Jon smiled, a wobbly, tragic sort of smile, and shifted closer to the edge of his couch, closer to where Tommy sat across from him, so that their knees were almost touching. “I'm sorry.”

From one perspective, Lovett had been rejected by three people at once. It was definitely a personal record. Maybe he could get it validated by Guinness. 

“Me too,” Tommy breathed.

They looked into each other’s eyes. If there was music, it would have swelled. 

It should have been the moment they kissed, but for some reason, they weren’t doing it. 

From the corner came the thrash and thump noise of The Voice failing to escape his bindings. No one looked over at him. The moment stretched ever longer, past the point that it could feasibly be called a moment, till it snapped. Then they were just sitting in silence. 

“Well, thank God you two talked that out. Are you waiting for me to leave to fall into each other's arms, or have you forgotten I'm even here?” 

“We're not—" Jon stuttered.

“It was a long time ago,” Tommy said, with a wave of his hand. 

Jon looked at him sharply. “Not that long.” That was objectively untrue, but now wasn’t the time to nitpick. 

“I just.” Tommy’s eyes flicked between Jon and Lovett. “Things are. More complicated now.”

“Things are always complicated,” Lovett heard himself say, despite that fact that technically, he did not want to persuade them into this. It was kind of a nightmare. “If it's about Crooked, then you'll just have to agree to not fuck it up.”

“No, fuck Crooked,” Tommy said. 

“Don't talk about our baby that way!” They couldn’t leave Crooked. If they did, Lovett would have nothing.

“I don’t mean it like that. I love Crooked.” Tommy was sending some very mixed messages. 

“If it's me, then I don't know if I can promise not to make it weird.” Lovett knew himself, better than he sometimes wanted to. He could be petty. He lashed out when he felt insecure and passed-over and jealous, all emotions he could see featuring heavily in his future. He wanted to be better than that though. He wanted better for them. “But maybe we can agree that for six months, you won't hold it against me for real if I make a lot of jokes at your expense, and I won’t hold it against you for real that you never invite me to dinner anymore.” 

Six months was good, right? Sure, he’d been half in love with them both for years, but he hadn’t had to watch them make out yet. That had to make it worse, boil the feelings right out of him. 

Tommy stared at him, face intent with an emotion Lovett couldn’t recognize. “That doesn't work for me.”

But that was Lovett’s best offer. He couldn’t do any better than that. He couldn’t. 

Eyes hot, throat too tight to talk, Lovett did what he always did when things got overwhelming, and made a run for it. He only went to the next room, he wasn't that reckless, but he did have to get away. He lay on Jon's guest bed and took big gulps of air, trying to get himself back under control. He needed a few minutes, that was all.

Which Jon couldn't give him, apparently. "What if I want you to come to dinner?"

It took Lovett a moment to rewind their conversation back to that. "Take it up with your boyfriend."

"I think he wants you to come too."

"Psychic powers for one day and you think you know what you're talking about. Tommy doesn't"—Lovett decided the drop the dinner metaphor. They were way past that tonight—"feel that way about me."

"I think he does." Jon didn't get it. He probably thought they were really talking about dinner.

"You fooled around, and he pined after you for more than a decade. We fooled around once and," it hurt to admit, even after the night's litany of humiliations, like admitting his actual most embarrassing secret, "he made up a whole new persona just to avoid me. And that's fine! I know I love to be pandered to, but there's a limit. You don't have to put up with me in every aspect of your life, or whatever you're proposing."

"If I didn't enjoy putting up with you, I would have arranged my life pretty differently."

Lovett laughed, wet and humorless. He didn’t know what to say to that. Sometimes being nice was crueler than just… letting something go. Of course Jon liked hanging out with him. He’d accepted that years ago. That wasn’t what they were talking about.

“You know, I thought I was having dreams about you with superpowers because superheroes are hot.” Jon into veered one of the sharper non-sequiturs of the night. “I’m trying to say that I think you’re hot,” he added, when Lovett didn’t reply. 

“Thanks?” Lovett tried. If this was a segue into there being plenty of fish in the sea, he didn’t think he’d be able to stand it. He started to sit up, because lying down suddenly felt perilously close to some kind of therapists’ couch scenario, but Jon put a hand down on the bed and leaned over him.

“Can I kiss you?” 

“What?” Lovett blinked up at him dumbly. 

“What I got from tonight is that you have feelings for me and Tommy, but for some reason you don’t think it’s possible that could be true for anyone else.”

Of their own accord, Lovett’s hands went up and gripped Jon’s shirt. He couldn’t help it. They wanted to be there so badly. “And you think that—"

Jon’s lips cut him off. For several long seconds, Lovett held his breath, trying to compute the sensation of Jon’s mouth pressed against his, afraid to move in case he fluttered away, like a butterfly. It felt that delicate, that fragile. He could feel his heart pounding high and hard in his chest, in his ears, so loud that Jon had to hear it. Could this really be happening?

If there was an instant to live in forever, this was it, but that was impossible. Lovett prayed the next moment would be better and parted his lips against Jon’s, kissed him properly. 

“Lo,” Jon murmured against his mouth, and brought both hands up to Lovett’s face, tilted it towards him so he could kiss him even more deeply. 

“Um,” a voice said from the doorway. 

Lovett startled away from Jon and his tricksy, intoxicating mouth, and pulled himself up into a sitting position. “Sorry,” he said, reflexively. 

“The Men in Black took the uh,” Tommy stuck to the silent pact they seemed to have made not to validate poor villain name choices and waved his hand vaguely at the living room, “him away.”

“We were just...” Lovett started to explain, but he trailed off when he realized he didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“I know.” Tommy took a half step into the room and stopped short, like a vampire who hadn’t been invited in. “I can go,” he offered, with a face that said he’d wander all night on the moors if anyone took him up on it and probably drown in a bog.

“Don’t,” Lovett said, without hesitation. He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew that wasn’t it. He always wanted Tommy, wherever he was. And he never wanted to dredge him out of a bog. 

Tommy stumbled closer. “I’m sorry. About, God, the way I treated you when we first met, and not telling you who I was the first time, and then—"

“It’s okay,” Lovett cut him off. And it was. Whatever he’d thought about Bolt, this wasn’t him; it never had been. This was _Tommy_. He knew, knew it years-deep, that Tommy didn’t hate him, didn’t want to avoid him. It sounded stupid, even in his head. Tommy pulled away because he thought he was too much, or that he’d fucked up too badly to explain, or that he would fuck up if he stayed, or because the five nat sec meetings he’d been in that day had sent him into a doom spiral he didn’t want to inflict on you. Not that they ever said it, but he knew Tommy loved him. The only question was if Tommy loved him the simple, fond, platonic way that Lovett had thought he did for years, the way Lovett had tried to pretend that he felt as well, or if it could be different. “I’m sorry I threw a fire escape at you.”

Plus, Lovett didn’t want to establish a blame culture when it came to secret identities and when they had or hadn’t been revealed. Jon might catch on that he, of all of them, was more sinned against than sinning, and stop beaming at both of them the way he currently was. 

Haltingly, Tommy closed the last of the distance between them and perched himself on the edge of the bed. “You didn’t know who I was, but I knew it was you,” he said, and Lovett didn’t have to ask him what he was talking about, “and I wanted to kiss you.”

“If I had known it was you, I would have wanted to suck your dick before we foiled the armed robbery.” That surprised a laugh out of Tommy, one of his best kinds, a beautiful high peal, too sudden for any kind of self-conscious modulation. Lovett had hoarded them jealously for years, and he could see a whole new seam of them opening up before him. If all of this meant what he hoped it did. 

Somehow beaming even brighter, Jon reached out and took one of their hands in each of his. 

“So we’re doing this?” Lovett asked, “and to be clear, by this I mean a polyamorous threesome.”

“Things work out best when we do them together, don't you think?” Jon asked. 

And they did.


End file.
